Insomnia Diary

Insomnia diary

Insomnia diary At  a.m. light from their living room sinks fluorescent teeth into powder dropped from the grey womb of clouds already moving to Cleveland, pregnant with snowmen. I’m a voyeur in the sense that I float through the window of a bungalow as parents take turns holding the scream of their son. I’ve seen the thorn of his voice contort his body. Seen his mother’s lips form sounds of comfort, her only medicine. Seen the man pace when not holding the child and the woman pace when not holding the child and both pace with the child in their arms, small miles of asking  their flesh to heal a stubborn pain. We’ve been together since one a.m. This is more intimate than watching sex, which may be a confession. This is more personal than my tongue’s opinion of saffron. And though it’s not the dream in which my left hand leaves for a better gardener, in which I stand above myself and pet my eyes, wanting back in, it suggests the dream: a feeling that each life is separated from a life, that each shadow has ambitions to cast its own shadow. Or just now, how both parents made a cave around their child, reaching across, reaching through  each other until there was one body, and how it felt wrong to stare, almost pornographic to see the hunger of a soul to encounter the nearest thing to itself.  ...