You're not sleepy as you seem

I love the short kid.

The Sacred
by Stephen Dunn


After the teacher asked if anyone had
a sacred place
and the students fidgeted and shrank

in their chairs, the most serious of them all
said it was his car,
being in it alone, his tape deck playing

things he'd chosen, and others knew the truth
had been spoken
and began speaking about their rooms,

their hiding places, but the car kept coming up,
the car in motion,
music filling it, and sometimes one other person

who understood the bright altar of the dashboard
and how far away
a car could take him from the need

to speak, or to answer, the key
in having a key
and putting it in, and going.

(I was awake when my dad's alarm went off at 3:55am. I was awake when my mom woke up, coughing, shortly after 5am. I was awake when the sun rose before 6am.

I didn't get a single minute of sleep.)
But when my window started to brighten, I couldn't help but get excited about summer...
as much as I hate the heat, I love the night--

everything is asleep (except for the stars and moon, but they're as calm and quiet as the sun is harsh; they're good company for a solitary walk, companions who walk along in a comfortable silence). The air is warm and smooth and actually lets you walk through it without trying to suffocate you. And the beach is lonely. It's so used to having a hundred people around to listen to it... like the kindergartner, it doesn't have anything important to say (or maybe it does? everything is important, but we just see through different eyes and the language they use is one we forgot many years ago), but it loves having someone who wants to listen, and ask questions, and just pay attention. At 4am, I'm the only one there, and it practically screams to be heard. I'm alone, you're alone, please just listen to me. This is just for you. I'm for you and you alone, please stay. How can you resist it?

Time passes. Early risers jog or walk their dogs. The moon and stars travel on to their next destination. The birds wake up the sun. A couple cars pass by, people heading out to work when the average person is just now stretching, reaching towards the sun they can't see yet, putting their feet on the still-cool floor... and I have to wait another fourteen or so hours to reclaim the world I love so much.

Breaking Up, Yevgeny Yevtushenko

I fell out of love: that's our story's dull ending,
as flat as life is, as dull as the grave.
Excuse me -- I'll break off the string of this love song
and smash the guitar. We have nothing to save.

The puppy is puzzled. Our furry small monster
can't decide why we complicate simple things so --
he whines at your door and I let him enter,
when he scratches at my door, you always go.

Dog, sentimental dog, you'll surely go crazy,
running from one to the other like this --
too young to conceive of an ancient idea:
it's ended, done with, over, kaput. Finis.

Get sentimental and we end up by playing
the old melodrama, "Salvation of Love."
"Forgiveness," we whisper, and hope for an echo;
but nothing returns from the silence above.

Better save love at the very beginning,
avoiding all passionate "nevers," "forevers;"
we ought to have heard what the train wheels were shouting,
"Do not make promises!" Promises are levers.

We should have made note of the broken branches,
we should have looked up at the smokey sky,
warning the witless pretensions of lovers --
the greater the hope is, the greater the lie.

True kindness in love means staying quite sober,
weighing each link of the chain you must bear.
Don't promise her heaven -- suggest half an acre;
not "unto death," but at least to next year.

And don't keep declaring, "I love you, I love you."
That little phrase leads a durable life --
when remembered again in some loveless hereafter,
it can sting like a hornet or stab like a knife.

So -- our little dog in all his confusion
turns and returns from door to door.
I won't say "forgive me" because I have left you;
I ask pardon for one thing: I loved you before.

Not Waving But Drowning
Stevie Smith

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he's always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

...photos from one of my new favorite websites, Someone Once Told Me.

"Know what I want to do now?" Midori asked me as she was leaving.

"I have absolutely no idea what you could be thinking," I said.

"I want you and me to be captured by pirates. Then they strip us and press us together face to face all naked and wind these ropes around us."

"Why would they do a thing like that?"

"Perverted pirates," she said.


Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami

Gretel in Darkness
by Louise Glück

This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch's cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas. . . .
and memory of women, in our father's hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave.
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln--

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real,
that black forest and the fire in earnest.