Collection 02.
My relationship with sleep borders a crutch, maybe an addiction. It is not simply the rest a nap brings, it is the unrest of the rest of the world that I am trying to avoid. I wrote these poems about sleep, and I put them together after a much undeserved nap.
—
Last Stop
We visit death every night
The calming atmosphere
Of not being here anymore
Nothing but infrequent pictures with a bit of sound
To keep us busy
As we board the train to the ever nearing end of the line
No thinking
Only an unreachable kind of peace
Knowing that you are dead
And only Time
Gets to know if you will ever be alive again
I visit death every night
Sometimes in the day
Yet I fear it every time I close my eyes
But when I board the train
I’ll never not smile to the ticket man and say,
“Hey there old friend
Gon’ and take me away”
12:21 AM
You know that type of sleep
That one that feels involuntary
You wake up and you have to check
See if you’re still you
You have no dreams
No images nor sounds penetrate
The level of peace that you’ve achieved
There is no struggle to get up
The Rest has inarguably returned
There is no need to protest for more
Your eyes shoot open
In the dark of the world once again
The darkness makes you squint
Thoughts rush back into your head
Like blood to your brain
Everything is still the same perhaps
As you left it before
But oh
How it feels like you’ve died for a few
How it feels like no one has missed you
Have you missed you?
Rarely will you have this Rest again
But it feels so sweet
So clear like water
You know that kind of sleep
That one that feels like nothing has filled you
But everything has left you
That one that feels like
What death must feel like
Nothing else would be fair
Good night again.
Nappy-headed
Oh, you sweet reward.
I always cheat to get you.
I do nothing but I let you in anyway.
I must not say that I do nothing.
But to do something would only make me want you more.
The way you numb me is angelic.
Devilish even for you to work as well as you do.
I want you all the time.
No, but that is death.
Okay, I want you all the time
Except —
To awake and want you again.
8:32 PM
Lord
I gotta get up
Outside these cotton covers
And the dry breath of my heater
Is a world of things I should have done today
Outside my naked knees
And bitten fingernails
Is too much to do
He sits at my desk and screams into the air
While not enough time
Pushes my watch and makes it bleed
I take it off my wrist
Yet it’s still there
Behind my eyes
Everywhere I look
But when I close my eyes real tight
When I focus on the static of a mind gone blind
And a heart gone slow
And I breathe in and breathe out of my good nostril
I taste nothing
I have crumbled the world into a ball
Made of a lost sock in the cover
And a asthmatic snore
No one sits at my desk
No one is resting on my arm
I’ve got nothing to do
I feel cartoons in my head and the lumps in my breasts
As I rest on my stomach
And feel the world crank under the weight
Of a poorly placed neck
And I grin inside my dreams
And my ankle twitches off the bed
As some voice that sounds too much like what I was given
Tell me
Lord
There’s always tomorrow
