At the Top of Thirteen, the Insomniac Dreams
Aside from the coal miner,
There were other jobs as well.
Take "the trapper," for instance.
Ever heard of the trapper?
If you haven't, I'll give you a brief
introduction.
Take "the trapper," for instance.
He's the one who sat in the dark.
The trapper, usually a young child,
Stayed in the darkness at the swing door;
There, he listened for the coal-cart
approaching
Along the tracks.
Just in that moment, the child bolted upright
And swung the trap door open,
And the action itself led way to the name
"trapper."
Mostly though, the trapper had nothing to do
but sit alone in cold,
muddy darkness.
In the quiet mines, the child waited
countless hours for a signal-sound.
Some days, it only happened once or twice.
When it came, the trapper would jump to his
feet
And open the door wide enough
For the cart to pass through,
But once the cart glided past,
The trapper returned to his quiet, sightless
world.
Darkness is long and stretched out.
He's the one who sat in the dark.
The trapper, usually a young child,
Stayed in the darkness at the swing door;
There, he listened for the coal-cart
approaching
Along the tracks.
Just in that moment, the child bolted upright
And swung the trap door open,
And the action itself led way to the name
Mostly though, the trapper had nothing to do
In the quiet mines, the child waited
Some days, it only happened once or twice.
When it came, the trapper would jump to his
And open the door wide enough
For the cart to pass through,
But once the cart glided past,
The trapper returned to his quiet, sightless
Darkness is long and stretched out.
Who among us has not waited at the trapdoor
And longed for the rumbling sound
Approaching?
We are lost in a dream with the tap-taping on jars,
Enduring darkness for moments of comfort,
however brief they may be.
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October 12, 2014 December 10 2014 December 14, 2016
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November 13, 2015
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13
About three years ago,
I suffered a terrible case of insomnia.
No amount of medication
Or meditation
Made any difference.
I was like a man forbid,
Weary, for seven nights,
Nine times nine.
Had I brought this curse upon myselfBy some slight or act of cruelty? The night moved strangely then.
And outside streetlights pressed
Into shapes of willful and coiling shadows.
On those sleepless nights,
The obscene muttering of pigeoned-ramblingsPressed into me.
Into shapes of willful and coiling shadows.
On those sleepless nights,
At some point, as every insomniac knows,
The bed became a grave,So I wandered, traveling through the houseConfined in my coffin of weary thoughts.
AgainAgain, I tried the medications,The meditations,And the breathing techniques,But nothing.So wide awake, I wandered to the Late-night television screen
And imagined a host of other insomniacs joining me,Watching.
From that period,
I remember the neurosis mostly.
I stood at the edge of the circle of dreams, bleary-eyed,
Watching the night watching me.
On the TV
I was watching TV
Watching me
On the TV
I was watching.
______________________________________________
Transmission:
I left Earth a long time ago.
I’ll explain how it happened later,
For now, I want to establish the setting
So that you can understand where I'm at.
I live in a spaceship, by myself,
And I’ve lived here for a long
time.
This is my home.
The architect favored a simple, practical layout
With few amenities.
Everything you see directly relates to survival,
A deliberate design implemented after
The windows blew out in the model II-37 series.
At least that’s what I’m told.
They say my model is build to last.
Forever.
In my more gloomy moods,
I liken my experience in space to the solitary
confinement
Of a prison,
Or perhaps I'm like one of those trappers in the coal mines. Sometimes I wonder if I've switched places with one of them, Or maybe they have switched places with me.
I try not to think about this too much
Because it makes me edgy.
k,;m ymxng,me c s,n bxv lz,;divn dtx. c ;r gckcth bxvxt ; y,;igcn cly,;vncjvs g,m,
To avoid a
downward spiral,
I try not to think about these close confines,
And
I try to convince myself that perhaps
It’s a good thing that I can’t see
What
is going on around me.
Perhaps it's a good thing that I am completely alone,
Completely in the darkAnd floating through space.
ng,m, cl xtsb xt, hxkng;n hxk g;l xt, lxt;tk ., dcss,k gcrg, cl y;id
I suspect it would actually break me
To look out a big bay window,
If one were build into the hull,
And
see some galaxy on the horizon.
It would kill me because I can't steer the ship.
There are no such controls, so
I think it would devastate me to look out the window
And watch it all pass by.
But what if things were even worse?
What if I looked out the windows and saw nothing?
What if veered into some deep space where there were no galaxies?
What if there was nothing, and nothing exists?
With no windows, I can at least imagine some type of life.
Sometimes I can hear strange noises outside the craft. Are
These the planets spinning? I feel a strange friction
vibrate through my spaceship’s frame.
I can hear detuned frequencies.
They surface like leviathan,
So I know they're real.
Then,
I imagine I’m trans-galactic,
Somewhere in the vast between.
When the vibrations stop,
It's mostly silence, silence mostly,
Except for the clicking sounds of the ship’s
Internal mechanisms and the sounds of my own breath.
I don’t know how long I’ve been out here,
And I’m not even
sure it would matter if I knew.
The days are seconds and the seconds are
years,
And the years are days, which I have a hard time understanding.
It's hard to replicate the
order of time here....
I'm so far removed from the sun-ups and sun-downs.
Time divides the chaos and gives me a sense
of order,
And that’s a good thing for me lest I should fall off forever into the
darkness.
I cannot sleep here.
_________________________________________________________________________
For some time,
The TV show Locked Up played in a perpetual marathon loop.
It played constantly through the late nights and into the early mornings
Carrying me in a cyclical wave.
In the TV show,
A camera crew captured incarcerated Americans
In the prison system.
In some cases, the producers followed first-timers through booking,
And in other cases, the producers accompanied seasoned violent offenders
To the SHU.
I learned about the system from my safe distance.
I watched "Locked Up" from my place of freedomAnd imagined all the other insomniacs watching along.
Perhaps I was trying to recognize
The levels of punishment
Where we all fit.
When stripped of stimulation and left on your own,
The imagination has no limitations.
External reality becomes subjective in a literal way,
Just as solitary confinement results in psychosis,
Insomnia affects the brain.
Some mornings, I stared out my window and watched all the birds
Gathering on my front lawn, But they were chips on the painted walls.
The birds were impossibly shifty
And when they flew, I saw their black-tipped wings
Form endless series of vertical ridges,
Parallel, but never crossing over into me.
I am parallel to other lines,
Like in corduroy fabric.
I am parallel to the child trapper,
To the prison inmate,
To the insane insomniac
Staring into the TV.
I am
Connected
As a moving unit
Choreographed in motion.
These are the electro-magnetic lines
Connecting us all,
Especially in dreams.
Yet what happens to the man
Who can't sleep to dream?
I've seen the lead-bird point assuredly toward Montauk
From my place as the trapper
Alone in the darkness
Next to the door
Ushering black coal
Intermixed with
in-sucks of fresh air and dust.
I've bent my mind to a focal-point in the sky: there, numbers are endless so I hide between them.
_________________________________________
Today,
I stood in the workroom at my counter
And I noticed a large dictionary on the tables near the restroom.
I knew to flip the pages and choose a random word.
When nobody was looking, I flipped the pages
And let my finger stab onto the page.
My finger landed on a single word:
psychodrama.
OK.
OK
Then,
On the way out to my truck,
I found a cut-out letter of a capital E
Covered in dried glue with gold glitter,
And I picked it up and took it with me.
I am here now,
Typing exactly what I see.
Something tells me the shapes of these lines
Are all musical vibrations.
I will transcribe then in a different type of notes,
But not now.
Now I must return to the poem.
____________________________________________
Every object is bound to vibrations
Of unfolding dates and shapes.
To most, this
Turns off
Like
A
t
V
The lead-bird, once chosen,
Navigates the wave of this
Magnetic field.
__________________________________________
It's true what you heard: The canary gave usChills.
The music stopped.
The rope felt slack
And the music stopped.
Surrounding us,
Unseen and perplexing,
Swarms of zeros and ones
Fill the air
Like sperm and the egg.
To most,
The invisible airwaves
Fill with jumbled disconnection,
Scattered dots: fragments
That vibrate data deciphered as bits and bites:
So many strings of zeros and ones
Seem like pieces from
puzzles
Than actual gold;
However, the findings are not meaningless.
The E in the street
Is deliberately fracked
And mined for the data it reveals.
You, dear trapper, are in the data mine
Speaking here with me.
I cannot pretend that I truly know you,
But I often pretend that you know me.
I like to pretend that one day,
While alone in the dark,
You listen for sounds.
As the coal passes over the threshold,
You hear the tap-tapping and know it's a message
I've hidden
In the very data
Passing by you. It's collected in pixels
And arranged in
sequence.
The question is this:
Who carries the cart to the trapdoor where we wait?
With your ear to the wall,
The tapping raps a code.
Amid the sounds of all of the space-noise,
The prison guards move coal
And an AI-like wizard
Sequences the chaos
That brings Judgement Day.
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November 13, 2015
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October 12, 2014 December 10 2014 December 14, 2016
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September 11, 2013 9 November 2013 November 13, 2015
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: the Insomniac Dreams
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