Somnambulist

[Doreen Peri]

I've been sleepwalking past
conclusions, unable to wake up
wisdom or the veracity of a pragmatic
dawn, my clothes removed like
a stripped waif and I chase myself
around adjectives which shouldn't
be written, defense mechanisms
redundant in my voice, the choice to
put thought down, my life sentence –
and for the death of me I cannot figure
out why I've tried to fit together letters
to spell out any point of it all.

I am a somnambulist.

I just took the scissors and
hacked my hair into layers because
my strands seemed to be embedded
with the dreams which would
never come out unless I cut them
off at the ends of the shaft and
now I'm frayed and eradicated,
played like the reprises of symphonies
never written, each tress landing with
the rest in the trash buried under
a bridge to the next verse.

Every time I look up, I curse
the goddamn sky for bulletholes
of light trying to seep through into
my brain and the insane part of it
is that I am undamaged by the way
Orion's belt always seems to tame me.

My left hand vibrates after I cut down
lengths of plant limbs untamed and
today I named a squirrel my pet as
he scurried up the tree afraid of me
because he had answers and I didn't
and the caterpillar's wormlike hairy spiny
larva of a beast implicated my reasoning
inch by inch trying to convince me I'd
be reborn again into a better, more fluid,
more recognized state after the winter
of my nightmare got uncovered with
snow plow reasoning because none
of this is real except for my right hand
as it shakes to play chords which don't
exist yet like I don't until the larva
becomes me again.

Death is a necessary vision just like
my father used to say before he vanished
into thin air and I dared him to believe
he wasn't going to return and he didn't.

Love like that is important.
I am a somnambulist attempting to
find meaning in the stumbling in between
dropping keys and recreating studio sequences.

Who can understand this drivel?

Those of you who sleepwalk past meaning?
Those of you who have your pen tattooed on
your inner thigh like some type of sexual revision
of yourselves; bloodbaths every 28 days? Or
those of you who have saved yourselves
for the lack of virginity with the sole purpose
of becoming once again by the ink?

Think about this for just one moment.

Then wake me up
so I can write to you about
the currency of a word.

[Doreen Peri]

i stayed up all night thinking about how to reply to this after nobody replied for so many months and then i realized i had nothing to say so i said nothing but replied anyway and stayed up another night thinking about whether it was a mistake or whether it wasn't a mistake to reply or not to reply and i came to no conclusions so i had to stay up another night to think about it more.

[SadLuckDame]

Doreen, I'm blown away. The more I read.

[Doreen Peri]

SadLuck... thank you so much for reading me. I was afraid my words blew everybody away... permanently ... haha... just a joke.

Seriously, thanks much!