the aftermath of insomnia

not easily absorbed into darkness

i turn my legs into ladders across blankets

where the long muscle of my flank

quivers like a horse's wet eye.

darling you have no idea.

whatever comes of this, cannot

be told to generations, it tumbles

skeletal and light from the box

like thousands of dried bumblebees,

stingers pulled smartly each and every one.

all day i tell myself what to say, how to move my arm

and fingers, how to curve my lips to smile avoid snarl

lock eyes if necessary but do not flinch or sweat.

these instructions call for attention, care-

i am vastly less than what i hoped to be

i had hoped, for instance, to be A World Famous.

it was not grace i longed for, but the expansive.

the ability to fill a room with soul, or my beauty.

the sleep-long sing-song crawl of the insomniac

took my tiger eye and made kitten, took my lion eyes

and made puppy, took my poison and made ether

where did i go when i went there, and did i ever

come back? Dad said ' be all that you can be '

and he took this seriously. his craziness was expansive.

his roar lion. his tiger eye straight. his poison lethal.

i took it and took it and took it, and what a sleep.

afterward the years came on arthritic and cold

and i lay wide awake for ten years, thinking about that sleep.

how wide. how cold. how deep.

i woke for dreams and dreamed to wake, breath

warm and sweet like honeysuckle. toss, turn.

in the hours of darkness and dawn the earth spun

beneath my hands like glass, smooth and crystalline.

i was awake, inside a dream.

moss underfoot. the bed tosses on oceans of hours,

messed up like waves in my hair. i stared at the hands

my hands, the ones that did, or did not. and minutes

were lives of thought. he was the ocean, i slip fish never caught.