.diana

.

There will be thick sleep tonight. Drugged on the dull anaesthesia of lullabies,
even the anchorless feel the tug of the deep, consuming like a love, a hunger.
Above, the moon sucks in the sky like a craving, wide-eyed. Dilate. Diana ditched
the forest for the midnight; she's stitched herself to the undersides of stars.
She spears and speaks through the mouths of clouds. Moondrunk, she's sunk
into the currents of our mumbled conversations; our fumbled demonstrations
of humanity. Hunting a heartbeat amongst a fleet of ghosts.

Sleep is her uncountry; the estuary that feeds her sea of sky. She steers
past the arms of drowned suns and daughters that reach from the waters.
Taking names, notes. Traces of heartbreak in the wake of her boat.

War-torn wishers, we flit and fall like sycamore seeds, feeling not high, but afloat.
Even here she hounds us, smiling like a child, dog-hearted. She is ellipsis, eclipse,
the call of the wild slipped behind the scythes of her fingernails. We close
on the guise of the city, the immutable face of a father, and collapse back
to our tiny premature deaths: sleepscorched breath and the smell of surgery.
Flight, distilled. Diana sits and sighs, the virgin queen, unravelling the night
into morphine; saline; the salt of sleepdust rusting round the eyes.

.

* * *

I wrote a lot about sleep whilst I was away. This is largely made up of ideas I salvaged from the wreckage of my attempt at a longer project...
Anyway, at least Greece (and its amazing mythology) was inspirational. I might make a series of these.

Also, some exciting news! Guess who's been given the chance to join the questioning panel for dA's An Audience with Margaret Atwood as part of their 10th birthday celebrations? Hell yes. :D