midnight is here:
the darkest hour
is now - midnight,
morning of sleep,
dawn without sun,
when pain recedes
behind a veil of black
and breath becomes
the only metre, silence
the only clock, dreams
the only sight.
my eyes, closed, roam
to follow impossible
possible storylines. we live
in a house we've never lived in.
we have children whose names
we have never heard, friends
we know like lovers, whose faces
do not register in the waking world,
complete professions,
obsessions, even whole
continents we have not
stepped foot on, that somehow
we know as well as our own yard.
perhaps when we sleep
midnight opens a gate
and we become like sieves,
the world's lives passing through us,
refining, mixing, going back
to their grateful owners,
flipping back to daylight
hours later, real again.
then again
perhaps these stories,
these near-realities, are only the work
of a brain that wants to work.
wants to make sense of fragments,
and so builds wholenesses
that we almost recognize as ours,
and midnight is work's starting whistle,
signal that it is time
to begin.
midnight is here,
so come, mind, come to work.
come, lives, mix with ours,
declare your
reality, take root,
linger in my heart
when I wake.
