today's poem, letting it be here

the nightmare that woke me at three

that night’s waking, the nights not waking

one, two, three nights in ten years? still

last night, this night just past, the one that

woke me had to do with a contraption like

a see-through toilet bowl inverted flushing 

into solidity a column of brown clay, which

after I delivered, to the hectic emcee, the

dry arms of the radiator pulled me up in 

the sheets and down, gasping for water.

next in the routine: start running fast away

wild to solve the world woken into, how to

make a life in this world that won’t precipitate 

nightmares in a sleeping one? thoughts and 

thoughts and thoughts, too hectic to pause

for a drink of water. somehow, I fell asleep

again, and woken anachronistically by the 

sound of crickets from my phone, wished

for more time in the sheets and the down,

now bathlike, the dream in which someone

was interrupting me to tell me I belonged.