"Insomnia: A Soliloquy"

The jolt—again—into thought’s incessant tangles. Exposed wires, galvanized. Insomnia's definition —sanity dangling off the jagged end of an unruly digit on the clockface. Never neat like three a.m. or precisely poetic like the strike of midnight. Always the crunch and grind like gravel under your mind.

2:39

3:21

4:17

A number not easily noted or divided or folded away, like the fresh bed linen you were too tired from no sleep the night before to change. So you toss, in the DNA of your own inertia, and wake, flailing on the sharp edge of seventeen minutes after four in the morning. Indignant glare of time's declaration of war against you, screaming in eerie green, insinuates room was peaceful before you burst in. Clock wants you back under so it can continue its relentless dictation of time passing, dying, uninterrupted.

Floundering , in a bed full of non-biodegradable mental landfill, detritus of long-gone serenity; radioactive anxieties toxic with unbankable half-lives. Alone, but grasping — and there's nothing you want to grab hold of. Contamination happens anyway. Your toss and turn is a futile horizontal attempt to run in a small square paddock of trumped-up foam and cunning metal coils. Miles to go before I sleep*. Never the slow-motion bliss, the glamourized glide of head to a pillow of placations, stuffed with Botox like the smile of airbrushed sleeping beauties in a well-paid lie.

I can't change the channel. My nights resist the thirty-second scripts of sponsored dreams.

My head's composing manic poetry. Lines of verse, scrawled on the ceiling—merging into a Dali landscape, always dripping away, dribbling over the margins of finality. Compulsive enjambment of my narrative syntax into one raucous, unending poem. Each line spilling over the edge of certainty, taking me with it, taking what should be the last word, never recognizing where or when a thing should end.

Full stops. Why are they full? Aren't endings so often empty?

Blurred resolutions are my solution when I can't just walk away, be done with an idea, a love, a moment. Am I addicted to ambiguity? My answer looms in the doorway, ghost of an absent father now dead —who only said I love you when drunk. Who held your hand till it hurt, who didn't feel the fragility of your bones — or did, and squeezed hard, anyway.

Late nights let perspectives and pronouns slip and slide in the dark. The universal becomes personal or is it the other way around? My story. Lines crossed out, crossed over. Boundaries. Mine, dripping like blood in a crime-scene. The senseless spatter of unforeseen consequences may never be solved.

Sleepus Interruptus—my bastard Latin translation for the inane convulsions of an unquiet mind. Sleeping in badly-spliced segues. Risk a glance at my square-faced sentinel. My night watchman, marking nocturnal passing.

4:59

Feel the silent slice of time's guillotine, beheading another sleepless hour. Hear its thud on the floor, dread its blind grimace, as it rolls under the bed to join the others—gathering dust.

* from “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923)  by Robert Frost

~†~

"Ghosted"

I walk this long, straight street,
as violet streaks of evening
chase the sunset from
the sky, this street I’ve walked again
and again, as all
the streets nearby

Knowing, without looking now,
the fences and foliage
of each passing yard, until
the street branches into cafés, bars,
a laundromat, a butcher;
commerce overtakes houses

Tonight, my steps falter;
the street, though empty, is crowded
a thousand permutations of myself
ghost the cafés and the pavements, looking
past me from a table, laughing with friends,
dancing to jazz in heels, or barefoot
in a park, to tribal drums;
elsewhere, her head on the shoulder
of a lover, in a lamplit window,
sipping wine

The sky above me, bruising over
the golds and ambers of this day, and
distant summers, as if
my pain has punched upwards,
pummelling clouds with fists
of disappointment, stained
by smears of betrayal,
thwarted attempts at beginning
anew, again, spread across the horizon,
like stagnant clots in the lungs

I struggle to summon breath,
to straighten and smile; she
brushes past me, a decade younger
I call her name, but she walks on,
walks on without turning her head,
in her haste to taste the night,
long waves of wild hair streaked
with gold and amber, sway
across her shoulders, untamed
like her walk

I’ve tried to follow her footsteps, but
they lead to different places now;
time renders true repetition impossible,
these newer ghosts crowd upon me too,
their outlines less defined, worn
from early intimations of trauma

With steps heavier than hers, I disappear
into another night, bringing nothing new,
wondering would she recognize
her future in my eyes;
as the last light
bleeds from the sky

~†~

"Deadlocked"

Broken locks are a paradox. Resolute with twisted purpose, guarding their secrets from both key-holder and thief. Locks are made for keeping things safe. Keeping things out. But then, there are locks to keep things in. Sealed up tight inside. Like wedlock. Till death do us—

Like Bluebeard’s wife, she’s forbidden to open one door in the apartment. Every walk down the hallway — the door glares at her as if she’s the intruder.

Broken locks — like a life gone awry. You take the key — go through the old motions, hoping for the same results. Insert the key, expecting to achieve the outcome of earlier years. Same old motions. It’s easy — isn’t it? It always. It used to. The logic of locks, like the logic of a sane self. I always. I used to—

Old apartment — so near the sea. Even though it’s not quite hers, she takes it. She’s used to that — to second-hands, sale baskets and sublets. She tells herself she’ll find a way to make the rooms her own. But for that room. That door. Behind it, the unseen room inhales as she passes, the crack under the door like a contemptuous sneer, stealing air that should be hers. She holds her breath, skitters to the opposite side of the hallway. Away from the sneering room. Away from a door that doesn’t need a lock — it’s found other ways to keep her out.

You try again. To insert the key. To turn it right. To the right. It always. It used to. Grip the key. Turn. Confidently — like the way you used to enter any room. Before the headlock.

Trying to let in the light one day, she discovers windows that won’t open. Windows locked, with keys she doesn’t have. Windows painted or nailed shut. So near the sea , but she can’t see it from any of them — and she struggles to breathe. Old asthma returning to wrangle at her ribcage, strangle her trachea.

A block is a lock with a “b” in front of it. B is for boulder. A boulder on the road is a roadblock. And your deadlines have you deadlocked. You try again. Insert the key. The old motions. But it’s stuck. You’re stuck. Life going on in rooms behind the broken lock. Without you.

The worn wood frames of the doors and windows shrink and expand like a ship at sea, groaning with the whims of the weather. The doors get drunk, angles askew, forgetting their frames. Some nights, she wakes to find the front door open, gaping wide into the dark.

Locks get harder as you get older. More doors develop broken locks. It’s a mystery — how keys develop Alzheimer’s. Lose their logic. Or is that you? You insert the key. Turn it right. To the right. You used to have the knack of it. You step back. Take a breath. Try again. It always — it used to —

At night, she dreams of forgotten rooms, beyond the walls of the forbidden door. The apartment yawns, expanding in the dark of her dreams. Doors she can’t open, rooms she can’t inhabit.

You want the key to work. But it doesn’t. The door won’t open. The old motions no longer have the same effect. It always. It used to — and you’re stranded outside, contemplating the cold concrete steps. Steps like an Escher nightmare. Steps leading with false bravado to nowhere. Dead end. A dead lock. And you’re broken. You’re the broken lock.

Searching in the back of cupboards and on dusty ledges for keys to locks that elude her, to locks that may as well be broken without the keys to open. And she dreams of keys, all lined up in a row on the lip of an old wooden chest in the room she’s forbidden to enter. Maybe that’s where the keys are,  but she’s more courageous in her dreams. She keeps the door closed — she’s read the old fairy tales. She wants to be wiser than those hapless heroines. She wants to avoid the bloodstains and beheadings. She can do without the air. Without the light.

Broken locks — a paradox. I did it to keep myself safe. Keep dark things from getting out. Like the lock on Pandora’s box. Shut tight. Shut up. But now I can’t let anyone in. I’m a lock that’s lost its logic. A lost riddle without an answer. A thwarted choice. I’m a dead lock.

They say the sea is bad for locks — she read it somewhere. The salt gets inside the workings — corrodes the ease of openings and closings. Comings and goings. Endings and beginnings. She struggles to breathe. Salt-clogged locks forget their logic — becoming dead locks.

I always. I used to—

~†~