Asleep and Dreaming

This is an instance of me getting more than I deserve

Because I could never seem to get what I need.

 

I shed a tear or two for the train on its way,

Making tracks for the walkway where I lay.

Barren trees hid the sky from my rolling eyes,

While my ears filled quickly with buzzing flies:

This is how the prideful man painfully dies.

Fists thrown out of reach marked “return to sender,”

Promising a one-week bender with a crooked smile

Put through the blender for awhile.

 

“Be reasonable,” I wailed at the unfolding universe,

Who said, “Better men have died from much worse.”

Since when did rational thought come into play?

I wonder from my consoling concrete walkway.

 

Cars careened wildly out of the street,

Striking countless trees and tossing countless bodies.

A corpse landed close on my right,

Staring empty and uncaring into a different midnight.

He turned and whispered through cracked blue lips:

We exist, yes, but we can’t continue on like this.

 

Someone with a flashlight peeled open my idealism,

A call: “Medics! Medics! This man needs realism!

Get him out of here.”  Put on a stretcher and born away,

Leaving my rotting friend to wonder why I’d gone away.

The ambulance tore through the sleepless city,

Sirens blaring and uncaring,

While the drivers, patronizing and without pity,

Kept tearing the avenues to home like they didn’t matter.

They told me—“Life is a series of disasters.

Hurricanes and driving rains and tremendous pains,

And all of it for very little gain.”

 

Streetlights tipped drunkenly over behind the vehicle,

Filaments incandescently flammable setting concrete ablaze

As the drivers navigated the municipal maze.

Fires consumed the old oaks and fine firs as we passed,

Catalyzing the exchange of neurotoxins for the synapse;

“Oh no,” as the LED next to me began to beep noisily,

“He’s heading for a relapse! He can’t shed the past!”

Who’s to say when this all began,

I wondered as they prepared me for transplant.

“This can’t happen again.  You hear me?  It can’t.”

“It won’t,” I promised them quickly

As I uncapped another bottle of whisky;

The ambulance hit t

he concrete hard,

Sending me headfirst through the window

And out of the ward.

“Warden, good night,” I drunkenly said;

By the time they reached me, I was dead.

 

I came to.

 

I looked down to see what was left;

Just footless legs and a heartless chest.

Sure, better men have died from worse,

I tell myself in the back of a velvet hearse,

While a pair of shoes encasing my feet

Dangled languidly in wires above the street.

 

I woke up blurry-eyed with a hung-over pride

Where whisky and loneliness cruelly collide.