No matter how long
The darkness
Seems to be stretching
At night
A day
Will surely come
With its light
Once again
August 13, 2021 at 03:44PM
No matter how long
The darkness
Seems to be stretching
At night
A day
Will surely come
With its light
Once again
August 13, 2021 at 03:44PM
In a nightmare it occurs to me
That I can become the scary thing myself
So I make myself light,
Float up somewhere near the ceiling,
And shriek high and loud
My victims get out of bed, terrified
And run through hallways in their nightgowns
Stumbling against the walls
I don’t actually mean to scare
I never wanted to be a scary thing
I just wanted to not be scared myself
So I try to float down from the ceiling
To tell my victims it’s okay
It’s just me and I’m not scary
But all that comes out is a shriek
And that’s when the nightmare
Became truly scary
July 19, 2021 at 11:18PM
I like the night. It is dark, quiet, and mostly made up of nothing. My back hurts less when I am lying down. Unlike the day, there are no disappointments, fears, angers, or other irritations—because nothing is happening at night. The lights are off. The doors and windows are shut. Nobody else is here. This is as close as you can get to the land before time, the land before anything. The night can be nothing, if you let it. That is, until you start to dream or otherwise create something with your own mind on the black canvas of the night. Even then, you are not limited by the rules of reality that afflict the day. The day can only be so much. The night can choose to either be nothing or anything. The day can only be something, and that something just is what it is. In the night you can choose. If you’re sick of it all, you can rest in the nothingness. If you want something more, you can dream it up. I do start to miss the day eventually. I want it to be real. Even if I can’t choose, it’s worth giving up some freedom of choice just to be a part of the real thing, especially being with others who are real and not just figments. The best mornings or the ones when I have started to miss the day as much as I can and that’s right when I open my eyes to see the morning sun peeking in through the drapes.
It’s when I get into the nighttime nothing that I can’t remember a single thing about the day and the things I planned nothing really means anything in the night unable to see in the dark dreaming up free dreams as many as you could ever want with no cost of admission and no need to make money to pay for them after the sun has set there’s a brief time when the mind starts to wonder if it will ever rise again and somehow thinking that it might not nothing is off-limits as if it were really your last night to live and nothing seems impossible but you have to hurry while this feeling lasts because as the sun starts to rise and the sky brightens you will be sure that there is another day to come.
Originally written on: March 8, 2021
Lying safe and alone, I am unindividuated and idle. My mind swims in the stream of dreams that is ever less loosely connected to experiences from my own lifetime. There are added elements from movies, books, and my own imagination, scenes I have only seen or heard about secondhand. I pass through these scenes, sometimes as myself, other times as someone else. Sometimes I am no one, I am only observing what transpires without participating myself. In this way, dreaming teaches me how not to be myself. Such that I awake surprised, when I find myself back within my own body and mind. At first, I feel contained. I feel that my wide-open dream perception has been narrowed into a limited point of view. I can still close my eyes and imagine, but it is less powerful, tethered to awareness of being in my own body, tied down by the constant reminders from my senses that I am connected to a singular body in a certain location in a physical world—hearing the traffic noise outside, feeling the bed beneath my back. I cannot lift off and separate as completely as I am allowed in the dream world. For one, there is less ability, but I also experience less need. I am not yet completely myself, in the groggy moment between dream and waking life, I have not fully remembered who I am. It would seem just as natural for me to close my eyes again and slip back into the dream world, if not for hunger or the need to get up and go to the bathroom. At the same time, I am happy, having returned to the land of the living, as I know it. Able again to say good morning and have breakfast and go about the work which I left unfinished last night.
I wake up with my hand plugged into her heart like a battery. Her closed eyes staring past her eyelids innocently into the ethereal. My hand plunged deep into her chest in the dream world where skin is a permeable barrier. She breathes all the deeper, undisturbed. For a moment I feel as one with her not unlike the sexual encounter. It is as if we have both entered the dream world tethered together by skin. As if the dream world were a movie theater and we both handed the ticket man our ticket with the same seat number and proceeded into the movie theater to have the same dream at the same time and as the same person. I cannot feel where my fingertips touch her chest. It is like when your leg has fallen asleep and you can only feel above your knee. I can only feel above my elbow. The rest of my arm seems to be plunged into and past her body into the sleep world where my forearm and hand are cut off from physical sensation. My other hand cups her neck. We lay on our sides facing each other, an arm’s length apart, connected only by my two hands touching her, and some other link that goes beyond just skin.
The city alarm is set
By the bus route
And the bakery man
Driving his truck of bread
And the other cars
Their wheels and engines
And occasional radios
And the street light
That never stops
Or maybe it’s the store light
Or traffic light
That always finds a way
Into your apartment
Despite your best efforts
To drape the windows dark
—The light and noise
Even here in San Francisco
Makes you believe what they say
About New York never sleeping
I breathe easy
In the night
On my back
Four fingers
Rest on my belly
Feeling it rise
And fall
A wrist
Props my head
Looking up
At the ceiling
A slightly
Different shade
Than the day
In the dark
And I just breathe
Prose:
The metal rod that held up our blinds over the kitchen window broke yesterday. So I took a hammer and some nails and stood on one of the dining room chairs to nail a bed sheet to the top of the window frame to serve as a blind for the time being.
I went to bed and woke up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water. I opened the fridge and poured myself a cup of cold water from the pitcher. I was on my way back to the bedroom half-asleep when the bed sheet hanging over the kitchen window caught my eye.
I stood there, naked and drinking my water, and watched the headlights from traffic on the street outside passing through the grey bed sheet. They seemed like ghosts from an unfamiliar world. The lights were distorted beyond being able to discern that they were car headlights. It was like an abstract movie.
I started to make up stories about why certain ghost lights would come to stop and then go again. The fast lights were in a hurry to get somewhere. Some lights stopped next to each other and made love before moving on.
I stood there in the dark by myself and made up stories about the light movie on the bed sheet until I was almost fully awake. Then I went back to bed.
Poetry:
The metal rod
That held up our blinds
Over the window
In the kitchen
Broke yesterday
So I nailed up
A grey bedsheet
To cover the window
For the time being
I went to bed
And woke up to get some water
Then stood and watched
Naked and drinking water
The headlights from traffic
Passing through the grey bedsheet
Like ghosts
In an unfamiliar world
The day teaches us to live. The night teaches us to die.
I wonder if the nights start to seem longer as you get older. As of now, I can’t tell a difference. The days seems to be about as long as the nights.
Some nights are longer, when I can’t sleep. Or when I sleep deeply and achieve a dream that seems to last a lifetime.
For those farther beyond their youth, I wonder if the nights grow longer. For fear that death grows near. That a night of nothing—no sound and all dark—is not all too different from death itself.
Something clicks
In the night
Unnatural, interrupting
A sweet lullaby
Of silent sounds
A flash
From the bus claws
Catching on electric wires
Outside the window
I check the time
And realize
It is almost the hour
When the mechanical city
Will start its day
And this click and flash
Were the early signs
That I’ll have to wait
For another sun’s passing
For the peace and quiet
Of non-mechanical
Night time
Up, I am up now
As surely as I said
I would sleep
Through the night
I am up now
Having failed
To fight off thoughts
That couldn’t wait
Until the morning
I stopped to ponder
Dangerously a dream
That, if left unconsidered,
Would have passed through
Perfectly in peace
To go on its way
In and out
Through each ear canal
Yet it was something
Shocking enough to stir
And once my woken mind
Got a hold
And seized it
Somewhere in the middle
Still in my mind
The gears start to turn
And the whole factory
Follows suit
Coming to life
In the middle of the night
I put my ear
To the sheets
And listen
To the silent rustle
That says shh
All else
Is outside
Nonsense
And absurd
Far away
From here
A daytime nap
Marries the motion
And light
Of the waking world
With the wonder
And formlessness
Of dream
Wherein the middle
Poetry lives
Dancing
Back and forth
In wheelbarrows
Full of dream
Dug up in sleep
And delivered
To be re-planted
Here in my bed
Brain tree
Putting down roots
Clenching my jaw
Unaware until
My bottom teeth
Meet the top row
Mashing
Like corn in a mortar
To dust, powder
Eventually
But not so soon
More slowly wearing
Waking me
In the night
With yet another
Symptom
Of my anxiety
I go for a walk
At night
Slowly
Strolling
And see
So many things
That I miss
On my walk
To work
Rushing
In the morning
I reckless write
What comes at night
Waking lately
Makes me wobble
Whatever waxes
Wanes tomorrow
When I one time
See for three
So I learned to
Sleep with ease
Dark as night
Except for sun
So when to wake
Is clear as day
Not for nocturnal
Lights at night
Never sleeping
Up early to find
Sleepy nighters
Still stumbling
Soon to bed
In the daylight
Not right
I wake up in the middle of the night, I think because of the steak I ate too late before bed. I have this energy now, as I digest, keeping me up. At first I am annoyed, wanting to get back to sleep. But then I think, I might as well take advantage of this energy and spend some time waking now, and then surely tiredness will come again, once I’ve digested and used up the energy.
i talk to myself
until i’m hoarse
at night
and wonder
in the morning
if it was worth it
because
i can’t remember
a thing i said
i feel like
an impostor
with
the up-for-work crowd
like i slept
last night
though i was
in the warehouse
eyes closed
trying to keep
my balance
in a different
kind of crowd
in the dead quiet
of the night
i feel so awake
and out of place
while everything else
is so dead
and there’s nothing
not even
the neighbors
to talk
or the cars outside
to go by