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8/18/2019 Last Sleep Best Sleep
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Last Sleep Best Sleep
Brenda Shaughnessy, 1970
Life, this charade of not-death.Amnesiac of our nights together,
overheard talking in some other voice.The great fruits of my failure:
silk milk pills with little bitter pits.Who talks like that !ays we are
ever-locked, leaving everything petalled and veined the way nature
pretended. !ynthesi"ed withinan inch of its life. # the many faces
of facelessness, breathing in the dark$ as if we could shape softness itself,
mold it around us like yams mashed
against a trough by a snuffling snout.
#ur own. There%s no way out. &ornto such e'tra, we are born to lose.
(o hairy fingers tapering to threads,grasping for some lost last use.
#nce we were hungry on earth,soon buried like root vegetables$
to starve the soil as beets do,growing in our graves.
&ut now we must remember our way back to face-to-face,
to eye to eye and hand in hand,and lock and step and key in hole.
)emembering how not to fall asleep,
we become so desperately drowsy,
8/18/2019 Last Sleep Best Sleep
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and all cells strain to slow to a stop.All desire to choose otherwise *uiets.
(o, no one can say we didn%t suffer,that we weren%t swallowed whole.