This is a poem about something I can’t do very well at the moment

 

Sleep

Am I simply a brain in vat, devoid of a reality –

A season premiere and DVD? Or am I more than that?

– When I walk home alone accompanied by nought but the big dipper?

My astral baby sitter, hanging high above like a child’s mobile:

Could I be alone for one second please, away from the sea of glitter Smarties

Someone spilled upon high, puncturing the cavity stricken mouth;

Now rotted away to a pale black nothing by the sugar of the Milky Way,

The lighter ride, on the brighter side, of the creamy star surf.

Everybody knows ‘the more beautiful it is, the more likely it is to kill you’

And this is why, when you look at the twilight, you curl up and die

For a few hours due to a Zodiac arrest, or better still a good night’s rest.

So now sometimes I while away an hour or two in the lacuna, shrinking an iris

As small as a pea so the lagoon of ink can permeate my murky depths,

Embracing me within the clandestine motion of the cloak and dagger,

Stumble and stagger little light beams as you race through space to penetrate this tiny

I.

Make me fall asleep when you disappear and reflect green shaped sounds within my fleshy lids

For the world not to see, synesthesia only for me, tasting the subtle hues of the day’s final lustre.

Out of respect my eyes swallow the medicine so I can muster a rock solid sleep to ignore the fact that outside this cocoon the world is black; mute;

Nothing but Ceefax.

 

And out there, somewhere, Jodie Foster is ten years old and talking to outer space via a trans-am radio,

Searching desperately for mom and dad, whilst I lie here slumped

For no better reason than a Tsarcophagus decreed ukase.