Sleep
SleepOnce supine, there is an unraveling of springs
which pop in slowly twiddling gelatin-print replays
of grainy sand-pitted blurs, as everything just stops,
and tongues interlocked and butchered of clear intent
become void—
straight blue lines demarcating ocean from sky.
A sea change; and the lighthouses along the coast
go dark. You fidget in and out of soft vine congested lanes
of terminal sleep, unaware of the truck you did not see:
A sheer black slab of noise. Silence!
The bladder fills and expands
like a stretched dirigible of desire
in time-lapse, as the moon descends
to the level of the unstated pillows
and soft mattress-springs erupt into
an itching of grey foliage, now skittering
towards daylight and incomprehensibility.
Synapses of cracked eggshell prisms—
through which tiny slivers of sky emerge like pizza slices
in the vague and dust-covered windows of old memories—
grow faces and speak incantations,
inducing sweating and glossolalia
spewed from the Carpathian foothills of worn gum-lines
like dentures on rocket-fuel.
You see the window
as a half formed image vies for top billing in the glare
of that one headlight of consciousness,
still flickering without context
into a staggered film-festival imagery
of randomized pictures running into unstable
sequences of separate realities: Basketballs pursuing
distinct centers of gravity, zoomorphic herring swimming
in white-brine;
and a paint brush copulating with an encrypted cell-phone.
Daylight emerges, and the shoe-polish waxing
of the previous dream drops off like a nylon tarp
in a windy harbor—all boats are soon unwrapped
from their winter moorings.
An awakening into the brittle clarity
of consensual hallucination,
followed by the anticipated mantra:
"I know that I am awake because..."
"I know that I am awake because..."
JZRothstein 6/17/2014
Poetry by Jeffrey Z Rothstein
Read 775 times
Written on 2014-06-17 at 21:49
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