A summary of good sleep habits's blog

The End of Science Fiction
BY LISEL MUELLER
This is not fantasy, this is our life.
We are the characters
who have invaded the moon,
who cannot stop their computers.
We are the gods who can unmake
the world in seven days.

Both hands are stopped at noon.
We are beginning to live forever,
in lightweight, aluminum bodies
with numbers stamped on our backs.
We dial our words like Muzak.
We hear each other through water.

The genre is dead. Invent something new.
Invent a man and a woman
naked in a garden,
invent a child that will save the world,
a man who carries his father
out of a burning city.
Invent a spool of thread
that leads a hero to safety,
invent an island on which he abandons
the woman who saved his life
with no loss of sleep over his betrayal.

Invent us as we were
before our bodies glittered
and we stopped bleeding:
invent a shepherd who kills a giant,
a girl who grows into a tree,
a woman who refuses to turn
her back on the past and is changed to salt,
a boy who steals his brother’s birthright
and becomes the head of a nation.
Invent real tears, hard love,
slow-spoken, ancient words,
difficult as a child’s
first steps across a room.

Lisel Mueller, “The End of Science Fiction” from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller. Reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press.

Source: Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 1996)

A Color of the Sky
BY TONY HOAGLAND
Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn’t make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I’m glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

Fair by Remy Zero [Garden State soundtrack]

Bird of Fire
by Rowan Ricardo Phillips, from Granta Jan 2012

E il suo
Volo di fuoco m’accecò sull’altro
The blurred moon, blanched in the new evening sky,
Amazed me as a child. How could it live
At the same time as the sun, (Downstar
I called it), captured by the melody
That rang out from it, dusk-bright, like a phoenix
Downed in civil twilight. The difference

Between the two, I thought, was difference
Itself: it made things real. But is the sky
Real? Aren’t its blue moments, like the phoenix,
Just the mind’s conjugations of ‘to live,’
Or the brain’s long division of ‘to die’?
Rouge le soir, bel espoir, sings the Downstar

Down night’s starry throat, already elsewhere, Downstar
No more, no longer the sweet difference
Between real and dream I knew. I will die.
I am not a dream. I am not quite real.
I am a dream’s firm ground. And I live
Because they are not what I am. Keep this

Thought for me, Poetry, as the phoenix
Seduces dreadnoughts to strum the Downstar
To sleep, and the skyline’s lights begin to live
Like notes in air; and in that difference,
That sleight of sun, may night remake the torqued sky
And distill dream and real from live and die.

A red cloud, speckled like an amorphous die,
Ferries the Internet’s dead. ‘Off to Phoenix!’;
‘TGIF!’; ‘Double Rainbow!’; ‘Nice sky
Tonight!’; ‘Don’t let this get you down, Starr.’
They speak, spammed or hacked, the indifference
In that act excused in saying, ‘A guy’s got to live.’

I chased the verb with the bird that always lives,
Saddled on its nape as it dove to die,
Its neck arched to the moon. Indifference
Spread through its ash-blond body now phoenix
No more, now part of the ground, now downed star.
Its frame, first feathered by flames, flailed blue. Sky

Swallowed the phoenix, seized round the Downstar,
Sang sky down to the city, burned livid
Until it didn’t, then praised the difference.

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free

 

The Atrophy of Private Life

by Jennifer Moxley, published in The Line in 2007.

In the heavy fashion magazines strewn here and there around the house the photos of objects and people mouth the word “money,” but you, assuming no one wants you anymore, mishear the message as “meaning.” Arousal follows. The lives of the rich are so fabulous! The destruction of the poetical lies heavily on their hands, as on their swollen notion that we are always watching. There is nothing behind the mask. Nothing suffocating under its pressure, no human essence trying to get out.
     Awareness, always awareness. Don’t you see how these elaborate masks are turning you into a zombie? The private life is not for the eye but for the endless interior. It is trying to push all this crap aside and find the missing line. Nobody, least of all the future, cares about the outcome of this quest.
      It is easy to lose, through meddling or neglect, an entire aspect of existence. And sometimes, to cultivate a single new thought, you need not only silence but an entirely new life. 

The Kills - Last Goodbye

Sampson Starkweather

I went to the ER again. Concussed. I kept saying that word over and over again in my head. When they asked me how I felt, I was a child whose toy was floating tantalizingly towards the deep end. Dumb, groggy, dull, out-of-it, not myself, angelic, if you ask me. I just sat there like a broken Ken doll. Deep in what Rumsfeld called our "unknown unknowns," which is not too far from Keats' negative capability, because when you have no choice, there's nothing to do but wade around in those unknowns like a child in a kiddie pool, unafraid of what's utterly contained. I know you think I'm getting these head injuries just to get poems out of them. To each his own.