Insomnia

Alex Brzezinski

o, for the old unconscious days when

     i hopped out of bed

at 7 A.M.

     not knowing how glad i was

to be repressed, 

to be unaware

    of my miserable

marriage,

    how glad to be lonely but

out of touch

with myself.

o, those great busy times

    when i was young and woke

    without memory of a dream,

no traces

of the inner shipwreck —

    no debris, no drowned

animals, no ark torn

to pieces by

         the powerful storms of night.

    could anyone have told me then 

of the nights

i would spend,

    all these years, 

haunted by

opaque dreams, an obscure 

    and heavy darkness?

         and yet, here we are, 

old, tender insomnia,

beyond acquaintanceship, 

    friends now,

watching middle-of-the-night tv together, 

    susceptible to ordering

    strange items from infomercials, 

    hoping this, finally,

    will aid our sleep.

but possibly 

we don’t want

         to sleep anymore, not

the old way. we

         want to wake up for real,

or at least to dream

    the clear vibrating images

that struggle upward from

    the depths —

dreams with stallions and

    who knows what else.

but no, that sounds too 

dramatic. it’s more mundane 

than that.

we have our job

         to do now. we 

have an ocean to empty

bucket by bucket,

         to find the bottom 

and the old ark

and all those dead two-by-two animals 

in need of decent burial.

    yes, that’s insomnia. it’s 

being

    the last surviving animal 

of your kind.

    so get up and stumble through 

the dark and pee and sort through 

your e-mail

    and eat something and possibly 

masturbate and then remember 

your original task

    and get your bucket

and see if you can empty the ocean 

and find another

    of your kind down there, even 

a dead one.

    no. that’s just an odd, 

feeble joke. we’re

not laughing tonight. 

there’s no strange animal 

down there. it’s

    a small boy flailing

    his arms in the huge surf of 

the dark. he’s waiting for me,

    and I barely recognize him. 

anyway, he hasn’t given up, and 

the waves lift and suck him under,

    over and over,

and that’s it.

Pablo Neruda