When tossing, turning, shifting sides won’t do,

I rise, and greet the living room’s blank dark.

A newish color on an oldish sight.

Three years I’ve lived here, watching shadows leer

From out the windows I forget to close.

I hate the silence of a winter night:

All there’s to hear are heart beats and neighbors

Who talk astonishingly loud through walls.

What stops me in my path to sleep? What dread,

What fear prevents me from the bliss of rest?

The promises I cannot keep. The books

I simply cannot read. The lingering 

And ever present anxious thought: Am I

Becoming stupider? Am I now slow?

For great God’s sake! My words tie up and trip

My mind, causing me to question what I know;

I do not even have the luxury

Of Socrates: oh, that I knew nothing!

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I know too much, and all too trivial.

And when I sit to write a contribution,

A cosmic retribution harangues the brain’s 

Electrical movement. Punishment for…

A punishment? That seems a tad extreme.

I think it’s more the natural consequence:

I’ve spent half my life just talking big talk,

And nothing to show for, really. Talking, talking,

That’s all anyone does. It’s all I do.

But what do we do? We’re alive, we must,

Therefore, spend our lives doing something.

Cliche to say: a whole lot of nothing.

Once, in college, I thought too hard about

Outer space, and Sartre, and nothingness,

And had a breakdown of the western white man sort.

It cleared my head, but at a cost I’d come

To know much better, much later. It’s this:

You gotta get a little cracked to get 

Along with the show. You gotta go with the flow,

Let the mind’s theater flow, until you know

That sleep will come when you stop being you,

And let the shadows do those things they do.

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My living room is dark and quiet, save 

For footsteps above. Another restless

Imagining of me by me for me.