Poems

Tonight’s performance
viewed from back of house:
all ahead, dead slow

verisimilitude of life (well, Shaw)
watched in Phantom Flex
No Exit made real

Icemelt action
pauses like geologic epochs
actors moving through clear gelatin

time on quaaludes
crawling into seabottom mud
and starving to death

The last time I couldn't sleep was five years ago April
Lying with my back to the woman whose bed i had shared
for twenty one years.

We both were lying, both unhappy
With the choices we made so long ago
When we were children

We both were awake now
No more narcotic dreams to give us
Misplaced hope and inertia

Since that night, I have slept well
I've felt safe, no need to keep watch
Over my treasure

The wee hours have a certain siren call
Ulysses and his crew would surely know;
I make an easy mark and willing thrall
to hands that clutch while spinning fast and slow.
The quiet and the dark both draw me in
with promissory whispers of the world
they hold in store for those, like me, who sin
against our flesh and dare to leave sleep curled
upon its neural couch: a land of dreams
awakened; filled with treasures, ripe with joys,
where each creative enterprise redeems
the promise that its very birth employs.
How sorry am I then to learn the truth:
the promise of the night is rarely sooth.

midnight. who needs sleep?
the clock is a lie.
a silly lie. there are hours
yet before dawn, you can
think just fine, of course,
you can accomplish anything
with will power. it's one, then two.
it could be bedtime, now.
but some idea catches you,
and you think hmph, why bother.
soon it's three, four. they
always slide together, malleable,
doughy hours, elastic but hollow
like rising bread.
being awake
feels like dreaming.
and then there's five:
no turning back now,
it would be stupid to sleep
for two hours and then get up
and go to work.
you aren't tired.
you might nap, shower.
then again, as light begins
to trickle through the clouds
you hear a plaintive voice
from the back bedroom,
little feet on the wood floor.
you say it's okay.
you say you woke up early.
he already knows
it's a lie.

I’ve piled onto tomorrow
a heaping mound
of wishes and hopes

it would be a miracle indeed
if tomorrow ever managed to arrive
it’s buried so deep

under my expectations
burdened with my need
to redeem the loss I perceive in today

how did I come to live my life this way?
the now hocked for a vain
chance that a future now

will remake the past
into something I will accept—
will have accepted

my gerbil mind spins
this mad wheel
in quotidian, frenetic desperation

certain that one more turn
will solve the riddle
plug the hole in my wholeness