Too Little Sleep

There's music coming from a house up the block, an open window calling it to find the night, the early stars, the fresh, cool air. Join the buzzing crickets, take time to caress late summer's dying leaves, be stirred by the soft nocturnal breeze that smells of pine-covered mountains. Snatches of the song sound familiar, but mostly (lost as it is by the distance and other sounds) it sounds strange, as though I'd been transported to an alternate world where everything I hear is almost new, almost unknown.

Sitting on the darkened porch I doze off, and wander paths that resemble places I've been but which are reassembled by synapses half asleep (if synapses can be said to ever sleep?) to become the latest form of those places I imagined on other nights of too little sleep and too much to drink, the aftermath of adventures through the city where I spoke to no one, not even my actual self.

The reassembled songs are full of hints and suggestions, turn this way, turn that, look over here. Starting awake I open my eyes and see the familiar shapes of the pines silhouetted against the less-dark sky. The moon is soon rising, the less-darkness says. By then the other world will be gone (it fades even now) and I'll never see it by moonlight. Sad. It would have been beautiful, I'm sure.


( Sunday Verse )