Awake

 

Awake

 

And in the end, 

maybe paper plates -

or the best china that could be mustered?

After all, you claimed no fuss was best,

so, let's lay this all to rest.

 

What woke you, who knows?

Around  pillows and sheets it rolls –

perhaps the cold.

 

Or wretched, uncooked Irish youth

you share this block with - kids

returning from celebrating cracks

beyond compare

and pissed as cock-doodle-doo,

puking rainbow-hued shades of deep purple.

 

Maybe interminable rumbles as Doha

cools, contracts and fractures;

creating infinitesimally small splinters

deep in concrete and sandstone

grumbling about weight and load.

 

Perhaps just the ice that forms

in your night's AC

clattering like bucket-rattlers

digging up twilight's weeds,

tugging grass heads gone to seed.

 

Fatal. Don't look at the clock.

For as soon as you do – the shock

of fears rearing like cobra headlights –

you're stuck in quicksand, the fight

seeps from your skin,

pores opening,

fixed blinking,

clinging onto fragments of dream,

comforting or otherwise.

 

That's it, then. 1am.

Doomed to toss -

a lost sailor in an inflatable rubber boat,

an armored knight unable to float

watching green tentacles of moat

surge, each trough deeper than the last,

oncoming waveforms that overlap

and crack like waves on shores

too distant to reach.

 

She swims into view, funereal,

lines of filled pews,

choked sobs, stifled howls,

her outsize casket makes its stately way

between the hassocks and prayers –

you summoned them incarnate,

then washed them away, wiped the slate

in a paroxysm of guilty shame.

 

Now, find yourself grasping levers

at the points of the trolley problem -

it's a switchback;

you constructed thousands of them

on living room carpets when small,

until vapors of age seized

you -  old man watching grandchildren

shriek delight

at fast-approaching daylight.

 

The future is coming, faster than you'd like,

two years, three at best

to spend with one you love

who fits snugly like textured gloves,

before a prodigal return

to that sulky sullen dame

who will not budge

and obstinately remains.