The Insomniac (Gena II)

 

She doesn’t sleep.

What does she think of then?

In a dreamtime outside of dreams.

 

The dead hours between one and four in the morning when only the cats are awake,

Daring each other in the dark with their yellow eyes.

The little white one with the blonde splotches wailing at the inequities of his feline existence.

He was a hound dog in another life.

Though once I dreamt he was a man—

A pirate with an eye patch.

 

Asleep in the bed against the wall that I share with her,

My brain manufactures these scenes.

And her,

On the other side, with the lamp on,

The light catching the dust and the odd moth that she fails to see,

Spinning the reels of her mind over times lost and never to be recovered in this life,

Attempting to revive memories irrevocably misplaced somewhere with papers, glasses and keys.

As the sun rises.

 

 

 What Won’t Die

 

If I could put my hand against his chest and it would imprint itself through his bones and onto his pulsing heart and into eternity, I would know I had moved him.

Like taller than me but not too tall him

Like eyebrow raised jokingly him

Like humming a song him

Like no understands me like him him.

And I wish I was he

And he embodied me.

 

In fact, I wish I could wake up ensconced in the arms of all the people I love

Those gone and those breathing

And that life was infinite and not finite and crumpled like time.

Because that is one of my problems

This aging out

These set beginnings and endings.

I think often of beating hearts

How they are set in motion and never stop beating until they stop beating

And beautiful and how cruel and mundane and enormous and why this.

I also wish I didn't have to slowly lose everyone important to me

The other aging problem

Leading to me somehow laying them all out

In the same and separate pits.

 

Oh cruel universe, brutal and unceasing

I want to live young but I will die old

As wrinkled, and forgetful and decrepit as them all

And full of missing and a lot alone

No one is special [in the eyes of time].

 

But some of it would be solved if I could have just been born in 1975 or he in ‘75. Back to him again.

Like humorous but not quite funnier than me him

Like barrel chested head thrown back and laughing deeply him

Like been everywhere but came back home him

Like how no one knows me less or more than him him

And I wish I was he

And he embodied me.

Because that’s how I’ve always felt

And what can that feeling do but flow and ebb and sit like an eternalized lake

And what can time do about what won’t die?

 

Townie

Blood in his mouth

Tooth in his mouth

He spits it out but wants it back

Because it was his once

Part of a nerve and a gum and a grimace

Lost in a brawl over the last cigarette.

Easier to inhale and exhale now

Between the gap of sane and insane

A chink in the Berlin Wall of boredom in a nowhere town.