A summary of good sleep habits's blog

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.

Captive performers 1: Cobain

 

Loooonnnnnnggging

Sub-arctic solstice and eclipse

Sacred Heart

By Ron Padgett

Last night I dreamed that my sister-in-law and I were snugly bedded in a dark cocoon, talking softly, safe and alone. With that part of me that once was in love with her, I said, "I missed you when you were gone."
     "Oh," she said, "you missed me because I speak English."
     "No, I really just missed you."
     It was deeply satisfying to open my heart this way.
     My father had torn off his oxygen mask, flung his gown onto the floor, and now, stark naked and peeing into the air, was clambering, tubes and all, over the bed railing, giving loud grunts.
     I sprang up, grabbed him by the shoulders, and slowly talked him back down onto his pillow, where he drifted off again. After mopping the floor, I went back to my cot.
     It was still dark out.
     I lay down and thought about my dream, the dream that was filled with the same rush of sweetness that had come over me the day before, when I had looked out the hospital window, at early light, and far below saw a person walking down the street alone, and felt the words thank you bursting from my chest.

 

There Is a Law Against It Here

Jessica Fjeld

The bull has a scheming gleam in his eye. The bullfighter is wearing many buttons. The bull runs in a triangular pattern. The bullfighter is an echo. The bull has just turned four. The bullfighter’s mouth sets as though above an ocean. The bull. The three sticks in his hide. The bullfighter forgets to acknowledge the crowd. The bull is a burdensome law. The bullfighter in front of his girlfriend. The bull at pasture. The bullfighter trumpets. The bull allows for the possibility of growth and change. The swell of the stadium. The bull’s luscious gravity. The great handsome moustache of the bullfighter and all the tireless spinning in the galaxy. The banjo playing. The bull lifts his horns as if to stitch the crowd’s noise together. The bullfighter has a can-opener. The bull’s leaking stride. The bullfighter could build a boat of this. The bull has a pulse. The bullfighter thinking of a smoky basement. The bull confronts the other in language. The bullfighter rolls aside the stone. The bull dreams of snow. The bullfighter belongs to a longitudinal fraternity. The bull self-medicates. The bullfighter can feel his hair growing always. The bull is the sand in the air. The bullfighter is the hooves that stir it. The bull is the patterns they make. The bullfighter, the light, the expectation of evening. The bull finding a new muscle. The bullfighter mid-thrust.

Published in the Boston Review September/October 2010