The Lying Time Poem by Richard G Berg

This bedroom, bearing a bed with no room
For smiles to rest or dreaming to blunder.

Beyond dinner, it seems thinner. Flat moon.
An embarrassment of white sheets, too light
For night or sudden headlamps to plunder.
This friend, near a radiator's cold sleep

Mummified in duvet, wakes to her turn,
Dipping the middle strip, a breath's breadth's leap
From how they stand when closeness cannot burn

Too early for clocks to speak. He eyes hair
Sloping her duvet's larval vale. She stills
This warm watch with words' thunder, shaking air
His turn for turning, until daylight thrills.

This bedroom, by ten, left. Feeling smaller


Richard G Berg
October 2024