Sleeptalk

I buried the dead
and they came up stories.
- Angle of Repose, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum

I am made of a series of stumbles;
of mispronunciations and a rhyming guide
to natural histories. Nights spent revisiting
the mysteries of the frame of a lightbulb,
fish nets, home. Such screams and sleeptalk
as dreams are made on and I am torn from –
as I am forcefed a pulse and a rhythm
and a mantra to forget them all by day.

I am the tempest:
the tongue of a soothsayer,
a palm full of future; and I'll keep
sleepwalking, snowfaced,
until I have nothing left to say.

* * *

And I'm running out of words.


Hopefully I'll get the chance to touch this up later - I'm not happy with it as it stands. Just needed to write something uber-personal again because I feel like I haven't been myself in a while, and it's starting to scare the crap out of me. :\

Now back to my reading list! [/procrastination]


Angle of Repose is an insanely amazing song, I love it so.
Also, Shakespeare references ftw!

Sunday's Child Speaks To Sleep

Once upon a Sunday, I saw god
and she looked like you – moon-eyed insomnia
collecting sleep-dust at the elbows, rusting
ball-joints. She chewed the chalk-lit skies
as they curved chromatic into my stiff yellow collarbones,
and swept up the night. She was busy setting suns
and settling the air, but she took the time
to answer my prayer in lullaby tones.
"Sleep is wrong", she said, simply.
And I agreed. Because alone,
I see you clearer –
hiding behind your rag doll physics as you rip
one day from the next with the kiss of death-
in-life, you shallow breather. Caught on the cusp
of your muchness, I have always been
your interrupted
girl;

sucking the warmth from your kerosene fingers
whilst counting the cloud-bodied creatures
with their faces of the blackout. Sometimes
there are whole nights unbroken,
of plump and pregnant hush; baited spaces
of uneaten breath. Your psalms of silence.
And then sometimes
I hear only the sheep speak
in their tongue of Morse Code,
clicking out heartbeats
as they tap their trials into my veins.
I count their cries on fingers,
but their bleats bleed like rain
and I soon run out of digits.

It seems, (as god said), that
I could learn to love you
if you didn’t smother me.
If you didn’t stifle me so completely
with your windowless pitch
and night-sheep that breathe fumes
to choke the lights. I am Sunday's child,
but you unplugged the sun
I sung to and left me
voiceless, orphaned. Now
I’m just a child who cries when her star sleeps
and your atrophic echoes litter
the ceiling, scattered blackly; latching
onto the backs of my eyelids.
You never did understand
that I only need one shadow. So
I made a promise to cling to my
unbroken daybreak immortality:
Never to let go; never
to close my eyes; never to get lost
in your fathomless deep -

and that when I grow up
I’m never going to sleep.

* * *

[Please see this poem in it's proper format here.]

I was born on a Sunday. This may explain a lot.

Sleep and I have a weird relationship. Sometimes I'm continually exhausted and think of nothing else but sleep; other times I can’t think why I ever need to sleep at all. I'm not sure whether the idea of it – a limbo of unconsciousness between the days – comforts or terrifies me.
The longest I haven’t slept for is 4 days or so. Apparently you go mad at 5, and die at about 10. It's a good thing that 'never' is a continually shrinking time span nowadays.

For the record, I’m not sure whether this is serious or nonsensical. The line between the two has blurred too much recently.

'When I grow up I'm never going to sleep
When I grow up I'm never going to cry
When I grow up I'm never going to try
When I go out I'm never coming home
When I grow up I'm never going to die.'
- 'Sleep is Wrong', Sleepytime Gorilla Museum