OF SOME NIGHTS

You say you hear it too,
You could be one of us. We,
whose nights mature before our eyes,
shrivel, die; and reborn from the ashes
of our dreamless thrashings,
our mornings, still-born sometimes
from between cushiony bunched up thighs
of bedclothes pushed roughly to the side;
living reminders of the night before.


Perhaps you might understand
how some nights my only lullaby’s
a plea, a keening siren’s call;
a burning yearning, white-hot bleeding,
churned and flung at blank bare walls
that close in, closing all around me -
what would I give to watch them fall?


Who fells them? Whose voice
slithers in through lightening cracks,
who shares my window; pushes my walls?
And now this dam-burst - railing, wailing -
released into the unsuspecting wild.
Two voices; yours and mine.


And now some nights my lullaby’s
a dawning, rough crossing into morning,
tracking doubt across my mind.
I wonder if, when I was walled in,
raging, calling, but safe
from the world, will I find that, perhaps,
I was saving the world from me?