Fugue on a somnabulist

All the familiar devils
So far so close and far too close
You hide and seek
In the sac of darkness
The cul-de-sac of sleep
Shadows file past
None stays and none goes away
Oh yes they are so familiar
They void and people you
On a first-name first-person basis
Across the remote numbness of the night
Blows a possibility of landscape
Where faintly luminous words trail to or from
You close your hands, your eyes, your nonexistent tattered wings
Fossilizing and dissolving
Into sand dunes that shift and stretch
Into hour after hour of drifting, minute by minute
Into the indifference of pain.


(07/01/25)