from the street below
car headlights cast shadows
across our bedroom ceiling
like an owl skimming across
an open moonlit field
searches for frightened mice
(June 20, 2023)
Category: sleepless
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By the time I wake, I’m worn out.I try to convince myself I slept,
because I have no memory
of being awake. All night’s dark
moments resemble each other;
until incrementally, day breaks
shadows cleanly across the wall.
I can see I am awake. Yet still,
I’m unsure I have slept at all.
My thoughts too are like this now:
ideas and images enter, then part
with only a hint they were there,
like a lover’s perfume on the sheets
hours after she has left your arms,
returning once again into his.
(January 7, 2023)
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Too many more days to be wished away
with a casual disregard tonight
for me to find comfort in their going.
Too much of a coward to let things go,I tuck all my worries in my pockets
tightly folded like origami crows.
There are no portents hiding in the stars,no mysteries to be defined in blood,
no plodding footsteps moving down the hall.
It would be easier to go along,to do what is expected at my age,
but I do not know what that even means.
I do not know what to do any more;so, I turn off the light and go to bed.
January 26, 2022)
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Worry
by
the darkness festers
into the night, then lingers
through the waking day.
(September 12, 2021)
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Night Terror
“When are we not in a dream?
…when are we not skeletons?”
—Sy. Hoahwah
I don’t remember
the dream before,
I cracked my head hard
against the wooden night stand;
the fine grained ephemera,
which held the dream together,
burned like flash paper into the air.
A lightning ball exploded
my darker vision, as the dream,
too agile to cradle, threw me
deftly from sleep onto the floor.
Not existing fully in the fluidity
of sleep, nor the concrete warmth
of the morning window’s light,
I held my head in my hands,
eyes shut, as the lightning flash
faded, leaving only the muscles
in my neck to burn like trees
broken during the night’s storm.
(July 16, 2021)
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from a work in progress: process, not a journey (54)
what music does he hear
when he wakes in the night
and the moon has slipped
like ice through the window
(April 18, 2020)
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from a work in progress: “process, not a journey” (52)
i’m exhausted
all day
yet at night
i cannot
sleep
i slowly stir
in my residual
bits of damp fear
like tea leaves
twirling up
from the bottom
of a cup
(April 16, 2020)
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What we wish
to hear, what
we wish them
to be: scolds,
advisors, absolvers
of guilt, devour
us like desire.
Yet, table thumps
and tarot cards
talk only
with our tongues.
The dead cannot
speak except
through ghosts
we evoke
in memory
late at night
when we cannot
sleep again.
(December 4, 2019)
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Any movement in dream wakes;tussled sleep and misery nestlelike cats unto my chest kneadingthe tissue near the heart searchingfor what scraps of love remain.(February 15, 2015)
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