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| St Lukes Hospice Shop, 20 cents |
Rust Never Sleeps
These days I go to bed to stay awake half the night but I don’t feel alone
I have the gravelly honey tones of ready steady sleep App guy with me
I’m not listening to his instructions - get yourself comfortable any position is fine
I like to lie on my back with my hands on my stomach croons Dave with whale
backing music. I get my breathing - in for four, hold for seven, out for eight
all out of kilter because I’m imagining Dave is right beside me whispering in my ear
as I massage my belly swollen with spaghetti bolognese and hokey pokey ice cream
doused in go the fuck to sleep CBD oil. He’s a dark knight in the darkness. Solid
buff shoulders, slight dad bod, upper crumpet British accent with a hint of lad.
Comforting. He’s my radio all night jock telling me the only girl in the bed
room that I can go to sleep at any time. Anytime. The whale parps, I’m feeling drowsy
holding your breath all the time really reduces your oxygen saturation levels causing
sleepiness and the hint of a headache. I roll onto my side and tuck my hands under
my silk lavender-scented pillow.
But my brain has detached itself from weariness, it won’t shut up if only it was
this active in daylight. Dave is still whispering to me but I start thinking about
Jayroam on swiftly softly back to sleep, I’m whittling a poem, a fantasy, I imagine
JayRay with a wide white beard down to his belly button sitting by a campfire in
tights and a gherkin-coloured jerkin belted over his round tummy, legs crossed
reading from a book as thick as Grimms Gruesome Fairy Tales 1st edition.
Jayroam my lil gnome smoking a bone pipe filled with nutmeg-flavoured tobacco
rolled on the strapping thigh of his homely wife who is a giantess named Gladdest.
I would share a pine-scented calico yurt with Jayroam any day in an ancient
redwood forest, I’d lie snug in my wool sleep-sack while JayRay read tales of beasts
and maidens with the bloody sexist scary bits left out. All the princes have to go
in search of professions instead of murdering dragons and pashing bored princesses
who they now can’t locate because they’re away with cool covens learning how to
be boss bitches.
After two PC tales, I’d be sucking my thumb while circling my left nostril with my
willow feeling like a babe back in the womb - my luxury waterbed - twenty-seven
degrees of amniotic fluid weightless warm, drift dreaming on mother love and
future REM sleeps.
I heart you sleep App guys.
Jane Bloomfield
Collection 2023
