To Sleep, Perchance To Dream Poem by David Lewis Paget

From what I remember of yesterday
The world was simply a mess,
Everyone at each other's throats,
It was awful, I confess.
I thought, we can't keep living like this,
There's going to be a war,
Someone will drop a nuclear bomb
It will all be on, for sure.

I had a drink with a couple of friends
And we sat discussing our plight,
Nobody wanted to go on home
‘Til the clock had struck midnight,
I felt so tired when I went to bed
And the last words that I spoke,
Were: ‘Everything's going to be all right! '
In the morning, nobody woke.

I staggered out at seven o'clock
Splashed water on my face,
Looked in the mirror, taking stock
With my hair all out of place,
A silence seemed to settle on me
From the road outside my door,
There wasn't a car to be heard out there
From the morning traffic's roar.

I went outside and the road was clear,
And the barking dogs were still,
Barely a sound but the rustle of trees
In a breeze from over the hill,
I tried to ring on my mobile phone
But the signal tone was dead,
I called my neighbour, over the way
But he lay, stretched out in his shed.

I went and knocked at his own front door
And tried to alert his wife,
But she was sat on a couch in there,
There wasn't a sign of life,
I took the car to the hospital
But the ambulance door was shut,
And not a nurse was on duty there
As the tension grew in my gut.

I checked the patients in every room
They lay so still in each bed,
All the alarms were going off,
But everyone seemed to be dead.
I drove in panic each winding street,
But not a soul did I find,
I was the only living man,
I felt they'd left me behind.

There wasn't even a dog or cat
Though I saw their bodies lie,
Just as if they'd fallen asleep,
Forgot to wake up, and died.
I checked the radio in the car,
Each station, nothing but hash,
And TV flickered on empty screens
Though I'd paid the cable cash!

Each day I wake to a silent world
Though I cry out loud in my sleep,
I find I'm having to talk to myself
Or forget how I used to speak.
But nature grows in the open streets
And green invades each home,
While waters rise in the dry creek beds
And the rivers are overflowing.

There's eucalypts in the barley fields
And the sea encroaches the shore,
The rain that falls is so clean and clear
That I drink it, more and more.
The stores that sit in the supermart
Went off when the fridges died,
I walk alone on an empty shore
And find I'm crying inside.

We thought the world was a crazy place
When the human race was whole,
We'd talk and bicker among ourselves
On everything bought and sold,
But now the earth is an Eden, I
Can't help but think it's a joke,
I keep expecting an Eve to appear
Since the day that nobody woke!

25 March 2013