This is a phone call "Furnished Room."
When I went to college, I lived in a furnished room,
and so I tried to describe the feeling of that.
"When you live in a furnished room,
the world starts to resemble a furnished room.
Even when you go out in the street,
people with winter coats on look like furnished rooms.
Your room is never heated properly.
You're always chilly and hoping to warm up in restaurants.
You buy a coffee.
You make the pretense of loving your paperback book.
An hour to waste before the show.
You grab at the immaculate bathroom of a college
Student Center, where you read a leaflet on the floor, which
means absolutely nothing to you, as
if you are forced to repeat a course in Spanish
or take a long pleasure holiday in a rainy place.
Later, you mingle near a crowd of strangers at intermission.
Your skin is flushed and you listen to their conversation,
and you are almost ecstatic, and you
have to return to your furnished room
with the tall ceilings, which are
unusual for the antique molding.
But why does one need such a high ceiling?
Better to live under the bed than to have that high ceiling.
The night will find you and the covered quilt.
And the newscaster's voice will seep in like an odorless gas.
And the upstairs boarder's shoes will grind down on your chest.
And is it true that you are lost in this one furnished room,
with no home but this?
And am I really lost for good under the furnished stars?"