Sleepless. Oh yes. It happens. Sometimes human beings just can not sleep. We are caught in some tremblings, angers unrewarded, opportunities thwarted; still winters give us shivers and all the dark bakes us black and leaves us bitter, burnt and crispy. I am with you, in this not sleeping however, I do not feel bitter, rather more curious. I am always curious about things see, and being awake leads me to thoughts like other peoples’ awakeness and what they are awake about and if they too aren’t bitter about it. What keeps individuals up at night? Many lay blame on the moon. She is too bright, too full, too thin, too quiet; I can’t hear my dreams, mayhap she come a slight nearer? Go a bit farther out, for she is too close, too harrowing, too whole and content and settled in her nightgown. Doesn’t the dark bother her, just a little? Perhaps none of you are thinking of the moon; the street lights are your chief concern. They garishly clack against your windows, streak claws onto your walls, scrape the restfulness from your eyeballs like an eagle clawing out the meat, scratching your orbital bones, making you itch, leaving crescent gashes that your tears of frustrations pool into, unreleased. Relentless. You don’t know why you are awake. You just are. You have always just been, like a force, or an atom, or a dynamo, or a ghost, opening the cupboards and closets at night looking for nothing. You are an action. Like walking. Water bubbling. A hand pantomiming the grasping of a star. Sitting. Not the actual sit but the bend. You are bending and bending and falling back but yet you never get to be absent, be free. You are not a ghost. Perhaps you are alive. Far too alive. The ocean rocks and you feel it. The spiders in your walls jump and feast and you hear it. The dust in a silver beams thunders as stones roiling in a avalanche of happenings, memories, you forget nothing; life sticks to you as though a starfish to the bottom of things, the origin of everything by your bedside and so it is always ringing in your ears and you stand, and pace, and go adrift in the blank space that is everything and so you are awake, listening, sensing, a prophet to the crux you wish for a word to properly describe but instead you choose silence, for it is the best thing, the only void to lay yourself down. You are without work. Without a job, or education, or you have too much education or just enough and dissatisfied you are with your own ramblings, jottings of meaning and philosophy and minds that it keeps you up. You are waiting. In the ebony milk you are sitting there, anticipating some muse or spirit that has been haunting you since birth to at last spear you and seize you high, raise you as a flag on some mount you are waiting, to be mounted on the wall of your god. Not some god, but yours. The one that you see when you blink, taste in copper swells and tweaks in your neck hairs when you see a fire brimming, raging forth from some deep come to smother you in glory yes it is glory; that is what is keeping you awake. You have risen up from some weeding well, and bloody and crying you are making your way up towards the mouth of the beast that had long ago gulped you, but still you lived. You slept, have been sleeping for so long that now you do not dare to close your eyes. You do not dare to greet a dream. You do not trust a nightmare or a bed for for too long was that blanket the lining of a casket in dirt cradle yes… Perhaps you were dead. Perhaps you were wasting in a chamber were even darkness could not creep in… And, now you are remembering the air, the feel of room, what a thought rolls like, what movement is; glory, you can not put it down.

You can not put it down, like a good book. Which, of course, is why I am awake. The pins and needles.