Last night I lay in bed and dreamed I couldn't sleep,
tossed and turned my subconscious inside out,
muttered muffled frustration at imagination's irony.
Grumbling feverish complaints, growled murmurs that my mattress couldn't hear,
my words were downed in the fine goose feather pillow, stifled by its stuffing.
Around me choked wild wide-eyed dreams,
endless alarm clocks bared lethal neon numbers like glinting razor fangs,
murderous grinning monsters of a jungle I couldn't see.
Terror bloated my mind to immobility, straining, swelling in the vast, strangling darkness.
Closed eyes shut one world out, locked another in
its blind images projected onto the screen of my eyelids.
My room was warped in a cinematic nightmare, no longer a haven of rest.
I drowned in the waterbed's cruel, slavering maw
as fiendish wallpaper cackled wickedly,
and a smirking spider's web of sheets snickered at my entangled helplessness.
The whitefaced ceiling stood mute, but its giveaway guilty glare
gloated of how they'd all plotted against me, stolen my rest,
battered my brain till my teeth rattled with betrayal
down my throat to eat me from the inside out,
beating my breast as I died of exhaustion...!
I awoke, screamed as a knotted string of static burst forth from the radio, tripped over its tangled self,
clattered into my ears with one eager clumsy fall,
snarled angrily to itself and the horror movie fled,
reeled off in defeat, fluttering between my lashes one last time
then over and out at last.
---Spring 1995
This really happened, or at least the part about dreaming sleeplessness did. From there I mixed metaphors and wordplayed my way to a pome that made its way into my high school's literary magazine above a print of a truly awesome painting of a skeleton innocently asleep in bed with a teddy bear, face and hair hanging from her bedpost, skin over a chair next to the bed, eyes in a glass on the bedside table. I was thrilled.