Asleep in your brain

Can I sleep in your brain? Is what Ezra Furman asks, and I’ve listened to that song for years and only now do I understand the question.

Everything about you, us, me with you, you with me… it’s here; here in my brain. It sleeps alongside everything else I know about the world.

But what I knew of you is old news. It’s changed. But I don’t know what has changed. Is it your cologne? Your haircut? Your likes, hates loves, is it a new person that matters the way we used to matter? Let it not be a new person.

Do I sleep in your brain? Do I wake within you? Do you already know when I will?

It was the train announcer tonight. She listed the stops on the line from London Waterloo to Portsmouth and Southsea. The stops to our home. Well your home now. Now its just something I own. She listed the stops with short platforms. She listed the stops I never went to because it was beyond mine. She listed the stops I used to listen intently for so as not to sleep through mine. This train, on a platform to the left of where I stand, I used to run for it. I used to run to catch it, countless times, to get back to you.

When will everything I know about you, and I thought I knew so much, have soured like milk? When will it no longer matter?

When will I leave behind the way you echo through my body when the world helps my brain wake you up?