When There Is No Cure for Insomnia

In the mind the xylophone keeps playing.
On a drum, I sit next to my shadow

Like a cartoon trapped inside the cold,
Lost cell of an unknown Dalí painting,

Flicking a lighter as I search the horizons
For any safe harbor of sleep. Overhead,

The moon has turned to a silver-
Dollar coin with the face of Kennedy

And soon will be dropped into the slot
Of one of God’s old pinball machines.

I think of song birds, how their ripe
First notes of poetry will spring

From an abandoned notebook of Keats,
I think of the stained middle page

On which he might have dropped his quill,
Stopped mid-sentence to cough

And spit up a few bloody raindrops.
The raindrops fall to my head.

The raindrops enter my brain
Where they dry black as squid ink.

In the mind, the xylophone keeps playing & playing.
I sit on the same drum and feel the whole Earth

As it sinks into the cold lost cell of a Dalí painting.
In the mind, the xylophone keeps playing & playing.

Unlike Peter Pan, I don’t even try to stand as
I watch the stride of my shadow walk away.