Sleep circles
with wide wings.
Pages vanish down the eye's well:

Napoleon burns Moscow,
French detectives fry onions,
Lorca dies in the greenest green.

Rain spits into the room
crooked, dark. I'm alone.
The gyre closes, soft as a net.

Dreams hunch on the furniture.
The mirrors broadcast
the Venetian blinds croaking

and rattling against the screen
like creamy swords
in enamel scabbards.

Book-addled eyelids
are rusting into blinks
of burling dusk.

Each dying thought
is a sleek Deco Bugatti
lead by a shining path

from teardrop headlamps
whose fingers pry the night
moments before tires

sing rubber to blue.
The rain gathers into serpents
in the channels of the floor.

Above you hangs
the fat black branch
of sleep's truest face.