Can't Sleep

My mind tends to act
aggressively
toward itself
early in the morning.
When I’ve come
for some reason
awake, and look out
the window
at the cold light
of some unresolved
hour—a few birds, much
cloud cover, one
smoke alarm dinging
somewhere
in the building…

I start the processes of paranoia, terror, go
about thought
the wrong way, the way
cancer goes about
reaming
your internal organs without saying anything. A perversion
of magic,
shit--it’s a systematic
unwinding
of my authority.

The water up there spills from
organized, peaceful cups
to buckets
and then
overflows
to the floor, and eventually, a
steep canyon with no
plant life
where it bakes to
dry death in the
sun.

Small problems
become emergencies.

I am the wild
murderer of Sigmund Freud.

Time is resisted by the earth
and all
except
me.

I am the bearer of the
greatest fears and
stresses
and unwanted inheretences of man--
those
which are mine.

So there I am, worried,
and I listen to her snore.
This is what sometimes
returns me
to a more humane form of things,

where
watching it go by is the same as
sleeping,
watching trees
blur into windowless houses and the
rank slough of man is like sleep itself,
and it sleeping is the same as
watching it sleep and
finally,
resisting the passage of
1 hr. some 15 minutes, sleeping,
I sleep,
which is, of course,
what they call it.