This is the whole world: your shirt
stretched against your heartbeat,
your collar chafing your throat

as you swallow. Everything is fabric,
one fabric. You’ve been confused!
You were naked. You thought you were guts.

Days, you’ve sat among cockroaches
on cracked tiles. They eat the stale cake
on the plate beside you, and also your hair.

Before this apartment, you hallucinated
your way across desert. Remember?
The world was fantastic. The world was giraffes

on unicycles. This way you knew
the world was fabric: because the circus
of summer followed you into the desert come fall,

clinging like only fabric clings
to your skin. Your clothing is rags, but otherwise
faithful. Fateful. It is your whole world.