Ostentatious Slumber Poem by Windsor Guadalupe Jr

My hands stood like towers,

Craning over the headboards

Buoying like the chandeliers

Hooting like owls perched on dead twigs

I heard the Moon’s harlequin laugh

Not far above the roof beams where I

Glance endlessly, shamelessly

Trying to induce sleep in another sleep

Of blindness and deafened ears

Deadened skin, and dead end paths.

-

Look what the err of sleep holds,

That in a dream, you should wake up,

Embellished underneath your bed

Are the monsters that you have created,

Spawned from one’s mystique vogue of nostalgia

Oh, and when I had to wake up,

In a sudden hint of the faintest vein

Of the lacklustre Sun

I long for sleep in my wakefulness

And in the wakefulness, I feel displaced upon

Oceans, deluges and hailstorms of pain

Bleak, desolate, nowhere to go

But to desolation itself

-

Counting the days until the days have spun

Into years of inexorable conclusions and moribund allegories

If I were to think of you before I sleep,

Soon enough I will drown in the sea of cotton,

And rot in the childlike sand dunes of reality

We meander and limp on our way up,

And we spiral with poise on our descent

I fall softly, subtly on my bed

Sounding the alarm inside my head,

Obstinate pain and waning comfort,

The melee is in the middle of its pandemonium,

And the bliss is as terse as the September drizzle

With fountains of oblivion ushering

Forth another life, a life of forfeit

A life of uncertainty.

-

Sleep, even sleep has flaws

It draws you close to comfort, to sanctuaries

And the way you stride past vibrant hazy dreams

Will tell so much of another moment spent

And lost in an ephemeral scenery of fractured heavens

And perpetrating inferno,

Just before it is too close to grasp,

It fades. It churns. It subsides.

You are back to misery.