Evening spilled onto my stale bedsheets. They reeked of ruined sleeps, a year's worth perhaps.
Sleep came in strange patterns,
unannounced to the wrong clocks and evasive to the beggars.
My clock said wake up,
sleep had decided she'd grab me and never let go,
like a lover I lost to a crowded fair, now tearing out from the crowd to wrap me up in embraces and kisses of a past that now lay only in dusty diaries.
The corner of my one closed eye caught red on the walls. My hairs stood up in unison, my mind went blank and my heart started pumping blood hard into my cheeks and ears.
Whew.
It's only paint, a few drops of red on a wall of fighting violets.
A painter's peril, maybe.
A shake of his hand, a tremble of his lips,
a gasp and a sudden chill through his spine.
He was as human as me, as tired as me. Perhaps he even slept on my bed and masturbated to the sunlight leaking.
Maybe he smiled, his crooked rotten teeth shining through his peril.