sorry. i know i’m supposed to start at the beginning
but i don’t really know when that was. sorry,
there’s something in your mouth. what was that fairy
tale about all the teeth? no, wait, that’s not the one;
there was… woods? maybe. i don’t remember. i
never had one of those big books of fairy tales
as a kid. i had a forest, though, and an imagination,
and something to run away from. and milk teeth. sorry,
i had milk teeth, how small your milk teeth are!
is that the beginning? if it is, let’s not start there let’s -
let’s start somewhere else. like the middle. the part
with alleyways and drug deals and i thought you were
the story i was searching for. turns out you’re something,
for sure, but if we start with that then we’ll start with feelings
and that’s what good poetry is about. and this isn’t good
poetry. this is an incomprehensible stream of anxiety
medication and being someone else so - so which part
am i supposed to play? i don’t have a red cape but the wolf
doesn’t have milk teeth. am i the one in the bed? does
that make me dead? i can’t finish this. maybe i should start at the
end.

Eventually,
you have to wake up.
You’re going to have to sit
back in your chair and drink whatever
stale coffee you’ve been nursing for an hour.

Perhaps all of this has been a dream, but not a good
enough one to read back and check whether it’s worth actualising
into something other than an insomniac cry for help. I would dial it back
if I could, make it easier to digest behind the eyes, but then I’d be
running the risk of saying things that I don’t mean. Maybe
there’s a little bit of truth to that. Maybe we’re all unable
to sleep in past noon. If you want to call me a liar,
I’ll take it. I’ll take anything at this point.

Especially if it’s over the counter.
You ever try that? For
insomnia, I mean.

They give you pills now, when you tell them you can’t sleep.
They knock you out real good and you wake up foggy,
the throes of a dream already slipping away like crushed glass.
You know, I heard of a guy once who got knocked out
and lived a whole other life, with a made up house and a made up
wife and a made up storyline, and then he woke up on the ground
and he was somebody else. I mean, he was himself, of course,
but he’d dreamed himself into another life, so the real one was more unreal
than the thing in his brain. Interesting, isn’t it? How time is fragile enough
that you can live fifty years in the second it takes to recover from a hard punch.
Do you see what I’m getting at, now? Pinch me. I need to know if I’m real.

This started off so well. I was in love,
and I was awake, and when I wasn’t
awake I was at least in bed with someone.
There’s a lot to be said
and so little time to say it in,
I even dreamed up a new colour.

That’s the big question
of science versus imagination.
Try and think of a new colour,
one that you can’t find on a spectrum
or a colour wheel. You can’t, right?

So the imagination has limits,
of course, but only insofar as the world
has limits. Blah blah, laws of physics,
blah blah, one day everyone you love
will die.

It’s not like that anymore. I’ve been
dreaming for so long that I’ve forgotten
how to wake up. Here, there are more colours
than there are words to describe them,
and more words than there are conscious
feelings, and thoughts,
like the world has been stripped back
to its coding, and I'm the virus
infecting it all with the terrifying
idea of newness.

Because — we’ve invented everything
we can invent, and dreamed up blueprints
for everything we can’t.
I think we’re done with the waking now,
and it’s time for the other to step in.
It’s almost done. But what can be done
when things are done?
Rest? A nice thought.
But we’re done with that, too.

It’s a June-hot part of May
and I’m in a swimming pool,
head underwater,
and the whole world is filtered
through chlorine.
I try to open my eyes
without them stinging
but the burn slicks my eyelids
back, like a doll I had as a child
when my stubby fingers would push
sight into those glassy eyes.

At the bottom of the water
my back hits cool tile,
and I only know which way is up
when I exhale some of the precious air
and watch the bubbles blink
out of existence at the surface.
I wonder if I, too, will become
something intangible once I
reach the land again, but I cannot stay
down here forever.

I know about drowning.
I have read many poems about people
who wave death in like an old friend
and maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
Perhaps we all end up
in a swimming pool, one way
or another. I’m just at the bottom of mine,
seeing in my mid-twenties in a haze
of unconscious sleep.
If there’s something that’s going to jolt
me out of summer adolescence
then it may as well be CPR,
but for now, I can sink,
like I am not the dead body,
but the boulder weighing it down.

Have you ever slept on an airplane?
What I mean, of course, is —
have you ever slept in one place
and woken up in another?

Have you ever been a child
and believed in teleportation,
if only because you fell asleep on the old sofa
and were carried to bed in weary arms?

What I’m trying to say is,
have you ever changed states?
Have you ever been a person,
and become a memory?

Have you ever opened up an old box
of photographs, and found that you
remember places, but not people?
All those people in the background are just…

people in the background.
Have you ever broken down?
Like a car stalling on train tracks —
have you ever cried when only night can hear?

I suppose what I’m asking
for is validation. Recognition
that I’m not the only liquid-being
trying to fit myself into a tall glass.

I have done and become
all of these things, and now my body
is a jigsaw of memory
trying to fit back in the box

without disassembling myself
into little parts —
like doing so would make me
the in-between, the part of the movie

that everybody sleeps through.

Imagine you are in a house with so many doors that you can’t breathe
for hinges and creaks and splintered wood. Imagine you peel
back the threshold to find a bedroom, the bed is hotel-made and the stink
of industrial cleaner fills you with blisters. Imagine you are trapped
in an expanse of rooms and no matter how many times you rip
the mustard bed covers away from the mottled sheet, you can never find
a room any different to the rest. Imagine that this is eternity
and in this eternity, you are yourself alone. Imagine that it gets easier
because it doesn’t, and you’re trapped in the limits of your mind.
So do it, conjure up a door that leads to anywhere else,
and when you can’t, imagine that you’re in a corridor. More rooms, more
and more doorways for you to stumble thought-drunk into, squeezing
the hinges until the oil comes out like lemon juice and the beds are made.
There’s light coming from somewhere that you’ll never be able to reach
and the corridor ends only with another beginning, you’re right
back in the thick of it again. The aye aye is pointing from the rafters
and you are plunged into dark yellows.
Imagine you’re sick with it, you’re green and turning like Autumn
into furniture. Pick a room and stick with it, you’re going to be here for a long

time.

I wear a mask in bed
to shield my eyes from the dark.
The separation of dark, really;
the two darks — the within and the without;
me, my eyes, locked into a body,
and even if I open them, I will be blind.

Outside the thin film of cotton,
the second darkness ticks onwards.
There is movement in this dark,
there is dancing,
there is a moon tracking snail-slick
across the sky, stars in its wake.
I could not sleep in this darkness
if I wanted to. I would feel motion sick
and my heavy legs would carry me
from sight to sight, dark to dark
until I became part of it.
It’s something I want to be part of, one day,
whether I’m six feet under or scattered
along the Earth, I want to no longer be scared
of the darkness that moves.