On Insomnia

And contemplate this: the heat-treated hairdos of next-door

neighbors, the roseate nosebleeds of fuckboys in hoodies;

your own face, rinsed in the mirror, the sweet green sweat

you’re riddled with in mornings, a rock pool reflection under

algaecidal light. You are going nowhere. This poem yokes

you, to the pain you are chronic and adipose with; to the desk,

to the chair, to ergonomic purgatory. And to the body, its

spasms and its rhapsodies, three-part harmonies, one-chord

wonders. You will never be whole. The voices. His voice,

broadcast on your remedial frequency, making its way

through a rubbishy dusk, the streetlamps beaming fizzy glow

like Lucozade. You will never be whole. Vomit o’clock

and the brain is Kraken, white and shaking. Open the window,

pry the chipboard from the window; fill your punctured eye

with stars. And contemplate this: Saturday night and the dirt

purrs with it; cars, litter bins, pit bull dogs. A girl with high

Yorick cheekbones drags a false nail down the scratchy

surface of a bri-nylon sleeplessness. A man rides ignorance

like a white horse, kicking mirrors from parked cars. You

have the itch under your skin. Insectile dysfunction. Lust,

with its own murky gravities. You will fail. You have not

made a friend of this city and you will fail. Cup your eyes

like coins. Addiction holds such simplicity. Check your

used-car contours in the broken glass. You are going

nowhere. They cannot nail you to a pronoun, hot mess

of cravings and behaviors, tainted frailty, old meat’s

rancid rainbow. Ugly. Contemplate. Consider: your

lilies, toiling like deaf ears, tearing the tired night a new

one, stirring a sulfate dust in your veins. Your eyes

are blue with pseudo-scientific toxicity, with chemical

expectancy, a dread that dries a smile like paint. Your

blood is on fire, full of bellicose adrenaline, nitrate

and neon; brighter, even, than the hoary fluorescence

of angels. It is so late. And you are pining the rhinestone

shine of a lost narcotism. Now trauma’s your ergotamine.

Trauma, your ergot, your argot of rye. Awful thought

that treads the brain’s rank breadth. Silence. Pray silence.

Pray the dark room away, the candles, the pious vibrations

of flame; the dim bulb with its gospel of moths, one

hundred pairs of gloved hands clasped to powder.

Marooned in your gooseflesh, one hand does not know

what the other is doing. It’s three a.m., the mind’s alive

like frostbite, a cold burn that blackens things. Your

graphite smile could shatter. Thoughts of him have

poisoned you, rust in the blood. You have not eaten

for days, you mottle, run your own hands over your

oxidizing thighs, watch the bruises ripen to a landmass,

a landmark, a brave new world, a here be dragons.

You listen to yourself, creaking like rope; your body, its

canned laughter repeating mean and low, throwing

out thought according to the malnourished algorithm

some devil has devised. You clutch and sway in a crêpe

air and you want-want-want what you’ll never have

again: sleep; his image breaking across your scrubbed

flesh like surf. Contemplate this: this is forever.

There is no movie montage where you’ll shop yourself

to transformation. You will never be whole. And grief

is not a line we walk to wellness; the tidy smirk

of therapy, the therapized, the girls licking flakes of gold-

leaf pastry from a Pret a Manger croissant, saying you

should take up yoga. Grief is a longing in the body, your

body, the machine-tooled aesthetics of starvation. It’s

so uncool, a super-terrestrial emptiness; the acetone-eroded

teeth of your disorder. He will not come again. Sleep will

not come and make an amnesty of bandages, the white

ribbons rendering you prematurely maypole. It will not

wrap you. It will not keep you. It will not launder or

succor you. It will break into your ballerina box, will

chew the jewels from their semiprecious sockets, set

them pulsing in your frontal lobe. Your heart has

a headache. Drink raw egg. Or Dettol. It’s up to you.

The sky is pasteurized by thunder ...

Notes:

This poem originally appeared in The Poetry Review. You can read the other poems in this exchange in the May 2017 issue.

Source: Poetry (May 2017)