Poem: No Sleep

NO SLEEP

Something in me doesn’t want to sleep

I might wake up in the rubble of Berlin
or marooned on an island wearing shoes
or after everyone has left the train as it
chugs its desolation through the Alps

Or the light has gone out of the world

And the tea set for the saints in their crystalline robes
has no place for me at either a side table or even
way back in the shadows of the room where I might
hear fragments of their conversation concerning

the way light filters through the trees of Paradise in gradated
rays each color of which each musical
saturated color of which has a definite meaning in our
various spectrums of solitude mostly abandoned by a sudden

sweet Godly closeness

7/23/2004 (from Cooked Oranges,
soon to appear insha’Allah)