NO SLEEP AGAIN TONIGHT

NO SLEEP AGAIN TONIGHT

No sleep again tonight.

Not haunted by anyone.

Not troubled by love

or the lack thereof.

Nevertheless

stuck by pins like a voodoo doll

in the hands of a spiteful lepidopterist.

By poisonous flying insects of insight

like a fire in a jungle at night.

Indigestible menus of life

that just don’t sit right in my belly.

Butterflies and starmaps.

I’m an experimental lightbulb

with a six million volt lightning filament

in Nikola Tesla’s lab.

I’m an over-reactive inner core nuclear meltdown

of a demonic hydroelectric plant

overdoing my afterlife

trying to put the fires of hell out

with heavy water that turns to steam

whenever I try to walk on it.

Lights off.

Head on the pillow.

Gas pipes bang and crack.

Whump of car doors

slamming outside

connecting with a right to the ribs

like the corpse of a heavy body bag

that’s just had the wind knocked out of it.

Snap. Whump.

My pillowcase

Deploying like a parachute

that’s candled like an exclamation mark.

This is freefall.

This is a comet

this is a coma

this is a comma

that’s been igniting dry ice all day

but doesn’t know how to turn the lights out.

This is insane.

This is like sharing your waterbed

with an anaconda,

your coiled box spring

upholstered by summer thunderheads

with a snakepit

performing a fertility lap dance for lightning.

This is a waking wet dream

without a succubus.

When I crawled into bed

my two eyes had the following

of a soporific colon with popular sex appeal

but now I look at the clock

forty-five minutes later

than it used to be

and all I can see

are the fang marks my eyes left

between three digital numbers

that look as if the poison

is beginning to take effect.

And all I can do

as they slip off into never never land

is envy their toxicity

as I o.d. on my own brain activity

like a crackhead that hasn’t lost consciousness

since the early eighties went punk

The medium isn’t up to the message.

But with the snake-eyed luck

of the insomniac I’ve become

they’ll kill the medium

but not the messenger.

Rosy shades of champagne in the morning

on heritage field stone bank fronts

with ghastly logos of fire-engine red

and a sky growing bluer

than Botticelli by the moment

the harder I try not abhor the dawn

the brighter it gets

and the more I take it personally.

I hate the fucking Renaissance.

Ghosts have their graves to go to.

Vampires their blood banks.

Blind star-nosed moles

don’t suffer in daylight

the way I do.

Who shows up for the nightshift

at the crack of dawn?

False dawn.

Fraudulent candle.

Artificial light on a pot plant

trying to get some z’s in the closet.

The sun shines at midnight here.

It crowds the moon out.

It elbows its way like a cuckoo’s egg

into the corners of your eyes

and just sits there

like a lump on the ecliptic

making up alibis

in the face of the conspiracy theorists

who see plots hatching out everywhere

for world domination by the Illuminati.

Used to sleep like the dead.

My head on the pillow.

Gone.

Not even a dream for years.

Dark, dark, dark,

they all go into the dark blank oblivion

of being no one’s sleep

under so many eyelids

and they sleep like Rilke in the death

he so seductively preferred to life

as the greater intensity of the two

but from this wide-eyed point of view

who can blame him

and as far as I’m irritably concerned

any immediate immensity

that could consume me right now would do.

Wu shi. No mindedness.

I’m trying to throw midnight oil

on my troubled theta waves

to calm my oceanic consciousness

of being lost on the moon

in the Sea of Tranquility

without any way to drown.

I’m doing what the Buddha did

with less effort

thinking what isn’t thought

seeing what isn’t sight

hearing what isn’t heard

my whole head blurred

in a cloud of unknowing

and my bodymind sitting here

bolt upright at my desk

like a lightning rod

giving the sky the finger

attending without attention to this.

Sick of being a nightwatchman

and a sleepwalker by day

as acutely aware as Methuselah

that time is a repeating decimal.

Sick of being a first magnitude star

paled like a wall flower by the sun

a bloodshot albino leper streetlamp

with its third eye perpetually open

in a diurnal caste system

that puts too much emphasis

on enlightenment

but isn’t sage enough

to know when to shut it down.

Sick of being singled out

for the eyes in the back of my head

by the dream people

like the thirteenth hour

the thirteenth month

the tristadecaphobic floor

of the thirteenth house of a zodiac

where the elevator never stops

on its way up or down

like a third equinox of the sun

the rest of the family doesn’t talk about

to keep one eye on things

like a Cyclops with tunnel vision

and half a sleeping pill

to do the job of more opioids

than you could bleed

even under interrogation

from an entire Afghani poppy field.

Bright, bright, bright,

they all go into the light

but the rest I’m up for

looks more like a re-run

of the simulcast

of a saturnalian white night

in a blizzard of shattered glass

that makes the sound

of one Zen chandelier

break dancing in an ice storm.

Even the mirrors are noisy.

And if a brilliant insight

ever had a down time

this has got to be it,

one of those anti-eureka moments

when your eyes just don’t give a shit

if you had a fulcrum

and a lever long enough

you could move it off the dock.

I’m bushed. I’m whacked.

I’m wiped. I’m wired.

I’m so fucking tired

tar looks overactive to me

and the pyramids have a.d.d.

Nothing works.

The sun’s setting fire

to all my starmaps

and even the fireflies

have been cryonically frozen

like the genome of a new ice age.

A crackhouse in downtown L.A.

during a police raid

caught in a brush fire

in the middle of a 7.8 earthquake

on a digital Richter scale

gets more sleep than I do.

Or a drug cartel with attitude.

Or a hive of killer bees,

oversensitive to the sound

of anything it can swarm

like a shopping mall

a bus stop

a subway

a dairy cow

a classroom

a neighbourhood

a psyche

a toilet seat

a third world country

like riot police on Wall Street.

PATRICK WHITE