For When You Can't Sleep Poem by Austyn O'Dwyer

Sometimes
It's easy to feel like a single pinhole of light
On a cloudy, onyx-black night
All the rest blotted out and asleep behind opaque wisps
But they are awake
Wike awake and singing still
Like the steel, perforated drums of laundromat driers
Spinning happily under fluorescent lights
That will hum the whole night
And sing for the sleepy faces watching the maelstrom of socks and shirts.
Maybe you will feel like a street lamp
Whose friends forgot to turn on when the sun set
Shining alone on a damp street and covered in rainwater
But you are alive and ebbing with the golden lungs the city
Thousands just beyond the trees shine bright and are damp like you
A quiet buzzing army of the city standing at attention with their steel hooked salutes.
Maybe you will feel like you are in the heart of the earth
And that's where you should be
Spinning like a top
With the entire world warming you
Miles above.