insomnia: A Collection

double bed

we are insignificant lovers, darling,

isn’t that so wonderful? the way

you wear my shirt in bed won’t change

the world, but i have never felt so safe

than when you are drifting between awake

and asleep, incoherent and warm,

all arms and legs and dreams.

you are the mornings, and sunlight

leaks onto your face, the gold

that i can never spend, and when you

smile the day begins, if only for me.

there’s nowhere i’d rather be, no state

i would rather experience other than

the liminality of you. you ask for five

more minutes in bed and how can i deny

you? not when your voice is so soft

and sounds like something i could fall

asleep (or in love) to. i’ve been waiting

for my life to begin for so long

and now i am letting it. i am letting you

in and i am no longer scared to live.

you are the well-deserved afternoon naps,

the falling-into-bed-exhausted sleep.

our skin is soft and shower-wet,

and we let it dry against the cool bedroom air.

when you look at me, i wonder

how you see me, how you smile where i

would frown at my reflection. when it’s dark,

and we’ve watched the stars for long enough,

i’ll feel for your back under the duvet

and rest well.

La Petite Mort

I’d been too busy so much of the time,

that the requiem between one and another sunrise

seemed to be far too full of birdsong.

(a love song to the insomniacs of the world,

awake a million times over,

and a million times again for the sleepless

and the sick, world-weary passengers closing,

briefly, their tired eyes against the window of the Earth.)

Let’s say that the whole world is asleep

all at once. Seven and a half billion exhales,

seven and a half billion crumpled duvets

and grasping dream-hands, landing soft blows

against the mattress. What are they dreaming of?

Let’s say that they’re all dreaming of the same thing -

of the apocalypse, a kaleidoscope of little deaths

stretched out across the expanse of a dream.

Time, in dreams, is elongated; stretched out

like the pull of thick cornflour. A person —

any person, can live a thousand lives

in the space just above the nose,

where the eyes don’t meet and the dream wrinkles

the creases of age on the brow. Upon waking,

everyone will be a little bit older, and the great, catastrophic,

unreal World-Ender will fall asleep, a little out of time

with everyone else. The clocks strike into action

again. Just like in the dreams of a thousand lives,

except this time, my feet hit the ground.

Sleep Paralysis

The foot of my bed

(where the duvet, entangled in dreams,

holds me hostage between the legs)

is slick with something cool.

Something cold — stark contrast

to the sweat winking amongst leg hair —

caresses, allows airflow to de-stagnate

the locked-in night breath.

She is all eyes and hands

in all the wrong places, long fingers

separating human from other.

Her voice coos like honey

and I am bound to mattress, shivering.

If this were a hotel, there may be a Bible

in the bedside drawer, but I would rather clutch

something else. This is home,

and with no choice but to welcome the night,

I release the dust from under my fingernails,

blessed spit holy between milk thigh.

I have heard tales of angels,

women of fire whose voices, un-silenced,

make ears bleed. I am no stranger

to blood.

The Two Darknesses

I wear a mask in bed

to shield my eyes from the dark.

The separation of dark, really;

the two darks — the within and the without;

me, my eyes, locked into a body,

and even if I open them, I will be blind.

Outside the thin film of cotton,

the second darkness ticks onwards.

There is movement in this dark,

there is dancing,

there is a moon tracking snail-slick

across the sky, stars in its wake.

I could not sleep in this darkness

if I wanted to. I would feel motion sick

and my heavy legs would carry me

from sight to sight, dark to dark

until I became part of it.

It’s something I want to be part of, one day,

whether I’m six feet under or scattered

along the Earth, I want to no longer be scared

of the darkness that moves.

Backrooms

Imagine you are in a house with so many doors that you can’t breathe

for hinges and creaks and splintered wood. Imagine you peel

back the threshold to find a bedroom, the bed is hotel-made and the stink

of industrial cleaner fills you with blisters. Imagine you are trapped

in an expanse of rooms and no matter how many times you rip

the mustard bed covers away from the mottled sheet, you can never find

a room any different to the rest. Imagine that this is eternity

and in this eternity, you are yourself alone. Imagine that it gets easier

because it doesn’t, and you’re trapped in the limits of your mind.

So do it, conjure up a door that leads to anywhere else,

and when you can’t, imagine that you’re in a corridor. More rooms, more

and more doorways for you to stumble thought-drunk into, squeezing

the hinges until the oil comes out like lemon juice and the beds are made.

There’s light coming from somewhere that you’ll never be able to reach

and the corridor ends only with another beginning, you’re right

back in the thick of it again. The aye aye is pointing from the rafters

and you are plunged into dark yellows.

Imagine you’re sick with it, you’re green and turning like Autumn

into furniture. Pick a room and stick with it, you’re going to be here for a long

time.

Changing States

Have you ever slept on an airplane?

What I mean, of course, is —

have you ever slept in one place

and woken up in another?

Have you ever been a child

and believed in teleportation,

if only because you fell asleep on the old sofa

and were carried to bed in weary arms?

What I’m trying to say is,

have you ever changed states?

Have you ever been a person,

and become a memory?

Have you ever opened up an old box

of photographs, and found that you

remember places, but not people?

All those people in the background are just…

people in the background.

Have you ever broken down?

Like a car stalling on train tracks —

have you ever cried when only night can hear?

I suppose what I’m asking

for is validation. Recognition

that I’m not the only liquid-being

trying to fit myself into a tall glass.

I have done and become

all of these things, and now my body

is a jigsaw of memory

trying to fit back in the box

without disassembling myself

into little parts —

like doing so would make me

the in-between, the part of the movie

that everybody sleeps through.

Swimming Pool

It’s a June-hot part of May

and I’m in a swimming pool,

head underwater,

and the whole world is filtered

through chlorine.

I try to open my eyes

without them stinging

but the burn slicks my eyelids

back, like a doll I had as a child

when my stubby fingers would push

sight into those glassy eyes.

At the bottom of the water

my back hits cool tile,

and I only know which way is up

when I exhale some of the precious air

and watch the bubbles blink

out of existence at the surface.

I wonder if I, too, will become

something intangible once I

reach the land again, but I cannot stay

down here forever.

I know about drowning.

I have read many poems about people

who wave death in like an old friend

and maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

Perhaps we all end up

in a swimming pool, one way

or another. I’m just at the bottom of mine,

seeing in my mid-twenties in a haze

of unconscious sleep.

If there’s something that’s going to jolt

me out of summer adolescence

then it may as well be CPR,

but for now, I can sink,

like I am not the dead body,

but the boulder weighing it down.

Handing God His Two Week Notice

This started off so well. I was in love,

and I was awake, and when I wasn’t

awake I was at least in bed with someone.

There’s a lot to be said

and so little time to say it in,

I even dreamed up a new colour.

That’s the big question

of science versus imagination.

Try and think of a new colour,

one that you can’t find on a spectrum

or a colour wheel. You can’t, right?

So the imagination has limits,

of course, but only insofar as the world

has limits. Blah blah, laws of physics,

blah blah, one day everyone you love

will die.

It’s not like that anymore. I’ve been

dreaming for so long that I’ve forgotten

how to wake up. Here, there are more colours

than there are words to describe them,

and more words than there are conscious

feelings, and thoughts,

like the world has been stripped back

to its coding, and I'm the virus

infecting it all with the terrifying

idea of newness.

Because — we’ve invented everything

we can invent, and dreamed up blueprints

for everything we can’t.

I think we’re done with the waking now,

and it’s time for the other to step in.

It’s almost done. But what can be done

when things are done?

Rest? A nice thought.

But we’re done with that, too.

The Waking

Eventually,

you have to wake up.

You’re going to have to sit

back in your chair and drink whatever

stale coffee you’ve been nursing for an hour.

Perhaps all of this has been a dream, but not a good

enough one to read back and check whether it’s worth actualising

into something other than an insomniac cry for help. I would dial it back

if I could, make it easier to digest behind the eyes, but then I’d be

running the risk of saying things that I don’t mean. Maybe

there’s a little bit of truth to that. Maybe we’re all unable

to sleep in past noon. If you want to call me a liar,

I’ll take it. I’ll take anything at this point.

Especially if it’s over the counter.

You ever try that? For

insomnia, I mean.

They give you pills now, when you tell them you can’t sleep.

They knock you out real good and you wake up foggy,

the throes of a dream already slipping away like crushed glass.

You know, I heard of a guy once who got knocked out

and lived a whole other life, with a made up house and a made up

wife and a made up storyline, and then he woke up on the ground

and he was somebody else. I mean, he was himself, of course,

but he’d dreamed himself into another life, so the real one was more unreal

than the thing in his brain. Interesting, isn’t it? How time is fragile enough

that you can live fifty years in the second it takes to recover from a hard punch.

Do you see what I’m getting at, now? Pinch me. I need to know if I’m real.

2020