Don't Let Me Sleep

eighth post, a poem of infatuation

I am entering in to a time in my life when I will do pretty much anything to sleep, but back when I wrote this I was in love with an, of course, unattainable man (as was typical for me then). We had just enough closeness for me to tumble head over heels, and be swept up into an agony of yearning. We wrote poetry to each other (my first outside of my bedroom since I was a teenager full of existential angst) and he wrote the first song anyone had ever written about me and recorded it for me. I would have given anything to have been kept awake by him, who needs coffee?

I liked to think he was in love with me too, but I suspect that was really wishful thinking. I guess we both needed this intensity and desire woken in us to compel our lives into their next stages. How love brings out the absolute best in my creativity, that aching, blooming, becoming better-than-I-am feeling! 

As we separated from our nothing-really-happened affair I read a brilliant book about love with a  Jungian psychotherapy focus, called The Eden Project - in search of the magical other - by James Hollis and it enabled me to start to imagine, what if these things I think he is - brilliant, clever, funny, musical were actually my projection of myself on him - after all I barely knew him, not really. What would it feel like to try to reclaim these things and own them. What would it feel like to write love poems to myself. Perhaps that is going a step too far! Perhaps what I really mean is what if I wrote FOR myself and not for him. Truth be told, I think it was around then that my writing began to develop a bit more beyond teenage angst (I like to think anyway!)

We still talk now and then but life has moved on. Now there is only a nostalgia for something that might have been, but here, in this poem, find the intensity...

This poem was first published in Ink Sweat and Tears:


Don´t Let Me Sleep

I already had visions
laced with these encounters;
bitumen coffee, sweet-cake pink,
your body spread before me.

Oh god! Your long fingers.
Let me offer you my still wet hand
A slip of love, another creature dying.

Tell me I touch good.

But then winter comes, long leaves
fall like songs.

Before the sky cataracts completely
tell me you see me.

Break me loose from my kneeling
here, on this pathetic floor.

Don’t let me sleep, not again.
Make my bewildered body
deep-roast dark-as-pitch.
 


Like all struggling writers and artists a little bit in the pot goes a long way. I know it takes extra effort to click and send cash, but if you have a little bit to put in the pot for some decaf coffee I would be so happy!