A. G. Bawang

This
Long hour
Of waiting
Is like that morn
When I drank thirteen
Cups of Arabica

I cling to this frail blanket
Frantically trying to abstain
From rays or forms of incandescence
I shut my mind off as if it’s a switch
But his convolutedness is Juggernaut
So once again I turn, churn, and curse in my bed

I now find myself groping for words to fill a month
I think this is how long it’ll take my darkness and I
To catch up like friends who drifted apart since graduation
Now I can hear three clocks simultaneously ticking in my ears
And the sound of the freezer is enough to turn my soda stone-cold
As thousands of little feet are hazing the ceiling into a playground

I wake up hoping that a glass of mineral water wouldn’t do that much harm
A late night talk show or a vintage John Wayne or Clint Eastwood western could still be on
I thought, as I picked the remote which is keeping itself together from the torturous
Onslaught of a two year old whose occupation is to pick up and fling things to pieces
I wondered how cavemen pass the time on a moonlit humid night as this as I flip channels
By the millisecond seeing more and more dinosaurs and flashes of meteors than tube pictures

Seven hours of bright lights squeezed cruel drops of sea water into my tired, red, and overly rubbed eyes
What does a man have to do to get a yawn he desires like an oasis in the sands of arousal?
I must have counted a legion of sheep when the first cloud of snooze rain, although just the size of a fist, showed its head
Pictures on the wall are gradually blurring, shadows are becoming longer and darker, lights are disappearing
Muscles have begun to twitch as consciousness, thought by thought, marches and evaporates to the sound of fainting time hands
Somnus came simultaneously with Dawn as if to say “finally” but the church bells drove the doze away-CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!