“..it’s like a good fuck,
half is worse than none at all”
Maeve Millay
Westworld – S1 Ep 9

Extract my whirl of memories
so her censure [when I wake]
isn’t my recurring cauchemar

after another disturbed night
of wily gledges by our rewind
[a play] of misconstrued sex

My raw dreams need removal
from my eye along with paths
that we wandered & we knew

[those we crept before access
was removed – after our lands
were sliced in half by our hate]

If there is a switch – or a code –
then engage such to re-set me
before we met  \  Let me forget

& not abrooke more nightmares
set in mortal time’s witherings –
half my mind needs defragging

to do tonight & every other –  be
cleared of her malicious wraiths
Now let me [finally] rouse alone

You reel in light – disturbed
by thinking’s whipped pulls
on your weightless lines –
not intended to really catch
Sleep is disturbed – it disturbs
with a spinning glinting fish
which is yours – a wide cast
to not knowing what is met
below a slowly-oiled surface
It hooks onto one more loss –
a fix into tender bared flesh
in his bloodied open mouth
Bubbled – his words of hate
spit in a heaved landing net
of bed sheets wet with sweat
And you see –  as yet awake?
That glint off slapping scales
in sunlight – he is thrown back
But he still disturbs your night

These are such long hours
in this slumbered house –
that only I ever know –

so being only mine to own
when the wall clocks talk
to no one else but me –

there is no competition
for chairs or channels
as the left alone wifi flows –

I unlock the back door
and let the dawn air flood
the breath-staled room

shorting the summer’s heat
that had been held over
from another day now gone –

which was all that remained
of a small part of my history –
a short story I’ll never repeat.

The intimacy of it
has been shelved –
I use the phrase
side-lined as well

The heat reduced
is also true –
I woke to the shunt
of a drunkard’s spew

A four AM throw up
of booze-necked shit –
the uniformed kids
will side step it

These hours are mine
before any one else –
No opened eyes
in my unslept house

My ugly bedfellow roused me
that itchy indolent whore

She gnawed at my naked nerve endings
breaking my sleep once more

She stiffened all the wrong muscles
made my hands lock into fists

She broke the reverence of sleep
with her poisonous nightly kiss

I convalesce under the counterpane
with the play of evening birdsong
and that blood rush roar of jets
lifting the propped sash higher

The late light on the roofline tiles
is almost that Mediterranean red
against the flat chalk-blue sky
but I am rolled up in Sussex

The same songs will find me
waking in the same place
as the light and sky are turned
and the curtains are ripped

Then this moment will return
of me laid low by the small efforts
which others do not notice –
I have lost the art of only being

“For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.” Santayana

Here we meet again
you are no longer my friend
you the jolt   the itch   the portend

This disappointment
which sleep is for me
it is a lonely thing

It is as if rest
itself
is now my disease

as if my unwritten register
of simple expectations
no longer allows its admit

Yet I will drift in day time’s impolite light
with eyelids weighted just enough
to stop me seeing

This puzzle of so many pieces
that each night has become

This my lost friend is you
my agonist
again

Sleep you are
my sweet-lipped whore
my head-bound fuck
but temporal

Do not look closely
at your borrowed life,

leave deepest scrutiny
to your surgeon’s knife,

look away from the glass
of aphotic reflections,

re-route your path
in other directions,

sleep behind curtains,
part-drawn for dawn,

rise this next day,
deny one more gone.

Sleep is that warm,
welcoming state,
through which I wander
in painless peace,
distances across
my long-slept skull
is that other place
where I run and fly,
that land of otherness,
of time, of love,
the expanse, the place,
I will leave behind.

I boot-up from an ill-night,
one of disturbances, of pain,
under unpolished dreams,
to the unnecessary brightness
now lighting domestic chaos:
my slept agitation seeps
across the bathroom, bedroom,
and then mills about, recalcitrant.
I carry over the dreamt infection
into the first hour of each day,
my crude night’s spilt-illness
will dissipate, but only under
woken, worked-on, distractions.