Why I am an Insomniac
1. It's brutal cold again today
clouds have shut the sky
next to me
no one moves
no one dares to look,
or look away.
I hate my dreams.
2. All day I've been trying
not to breathe. There's a crushing weight
and I can't move
and I can't scream
and I can't even open my eyes.
I hate my dreams.
3. My cheek is pressed to concrete. My hand
curls against its cold texture.
I pretend to sleep, but hear
everything. Footsteps come closer.
The impact
when he kicks me
hard
on the head
sounds like steel ringing between my ears.
I wake up, and still hear it
and still feel the pain.
I hate my dreams.
*********************************************************************************************************
Lullabye
There was
a gaping hole in the earth
too wide to cross
(hush go to sleep)
There was
a chasm that opened
to swallow everyone
(hush go to sleep)
There was
a terrible place in the earth
(hush go to sleep)
There was
an emptiness in the earth
from which nothing escaped
(hush go to sleep)
There was
a broken place in the earth
(hush go to sleep)
There was
a terrible gap
and someone pushed
and someone fell
and nothing
has been the same
(hush go to sleep)
*********************************************************************************************************
Certainty (a poem for comfort)
When everything else
is running off-kilter around me
they're always there, cold friends.
Some of them I know by name
electron, proton, positron,
quarks up and down and strange
and charmed. I thought
I was living a charmed life,
but it was only strange.
The uncertainty of particles is better
than the uncertainty of living, or at least
it's less scary. I'm scared all the time now
trying not to collapse into myself.
Those cosmic rays are still at it
going right through me as if I were a ghost
and maybe the way you need
that sneaky square root of minus one
to solve the universe (or even build a TV set)
holds out hope of immortality: if i
is real, and necessary,
maybe so am I?
In the closest thing to total vacuum
particles come and go, sometimes tending to exist.
Sometimes
I tend to hope, but too often
hope flickers back into the void, leaving
the closest thing to total despair.
The net energy of the entire universe
may be zero: each star cancelled out by its own death
space imploding back toward its beginning. That's
the sound of one hand clapping.
Yet the unused six dimensions
are curled up smaller than atoms.
Everything that is might be the vibration
of threads too small to see,
musical notes of superstrings.
Take two particles from the same source
separate them, any distance will do,
and what you do to one of them
will instantly affect the other. (As I
am affected by you.)
At this smallest level the usual rules don't apply
time is just a field to roam in
ghosts occur
miracles are the order of the day.
This is where the solid daily world comes from,
all these mysteries and miracles
built upon each other until they seem ordinary.
*********************************************************************************************************
Night
I bet you could tell stories
of the dark stars of our fate.
I bet you and I could go walking
through the city
and the sidewalk would turn to stars
as we held hands.
A glittering lodestar would light our way
past the lights, past the bars and closed stores;
a lodestar over my heart
lodestar, lodestone--I seek you
as pins seek a lodestone--the sea air
from the harbor would blow us along.
I bet
if you held your hand up
and opened it
a black butterfly would fly from it.
