Too Drunk to Sleep

on another evening there was smokescreen

and sleep wiped like water with windshields until nothing but waking and darkness dwelt together

and in waking, darkness dreamt, and in darkness, waking wept, and so was kept the balance of things

though perhaps not quite balance

perhaps a grain of weight mislaid or a careless dullard denying the scale its daily maintenance

waking darkness dreamt and dreamt of darker things, and weeping wavers in the balance it brings

Tom Nikon. Tired, named for a lens he had nothing of and lost to an inheritance split too many times

It is a tired time Tom tells us, sitting with hand on camera lens and leaning forward, too close for telling of tales too far for touch or lipped tongue taste

It is a tired time and one empty of ambition

where few are willing and many are weak - flesh and spirit

and too Tom answers Mary Monet

who asks him

"But what of the new and unexplored

but what of me?"

Tom, taxed in twee response coaxes tired words to loss

and Mary Monet, who is not tired or twee, answers him unlovingly "Tom tired and taught, twee, unloved, untaught sleep now and do not bother me"

and where her words fell on his ears Tom felt he ought

and where her words fell on his ears Tom felt taught, stretched to breaking, unbreaking stretched to bending, unbending stretched to lord of infinite abyss and there to die, but for Mary Monet

who rescues with word play and crafts a seat of puns and net of nouns and sleeping cats and cradles, towns employed in lingering story stretching to the other shore the way of things on the sea to rhythms of wave and wind and Mary Monet with quiet content knows Tom has nothing and will soon be spent

as here, again, he goes

crying "I'm tired and out and roundabout and emptied through the nose, and when a husk, through myrrh and musk I'll leave and not suppose / that underhill and undersky and steep though course may be, a tired man with stewed brainpan will not a poet nor great bard be"