insomnia

of course,
some of the sounds that you hear in the night
are house-settling, wall-expanding, wall-contraction sounds,
but others are more difficult to place, harder to
classify, by far stranger and
more emotionally charged and anxious-feeling.  such as:
good-looking broad-shouldered tight-backed young men
sit alone at night naked in
their hard chairs, the hard shiny wood sticking to their skin,
the backs of their legs; the curve of their smooth naked butts flattens only
slightly aginst
the slick, shiny, sweat-slick varnish.
they sit bent over, their chins almost touching the backs of their big-fingered hands,
writing their secret poems that they won't
show to anyone  not even you
not even me
and
they swill a bit more beer and scratch their handsome heads
and touch their ample balls, apply fingertips to nipples,
scrawl a few more words of
beautiful-naked-young-man secret verse onto crinkled
bits of sweat-grimy paper.
suddenly they'll
stand up and
rush out,
they'll stuff their secret poems into hidden crevices,
they'll drill holes into sheer rock cliffs, stuff in the poems, cram them
deep into the deepest opening they can make, glob on layers
of syrupy and secretive gray cement. as they
slink naked through the darkness, they'll make
digging sounds with their fingernails and with other handy-dandy
sharp instruments, they'll make mixing sounds
in grimy metallic cement pots, their bare feet
moving gravel-against-gravel over night-blackened ground,
and what's more they'll growl their odd
pathetic sad little whispery croaking growls into
the big swirling mess of the
hidden night-black sky.
oh yes without a doubt, that's what some of those night-sounds are:
beautiful naked young men slinking through the
darkness, hiding their secret poems in dark empty
spaces, sliding things around, digging, mixing,
growling oddly and hauntingly, why good golly, it's almost a song.
late at night the house may settle and pop and
groan alarmingly and sometimes
sound like it's angry and in torment and
is going to eat you for supper, but those kinds of
sounds are neither sad enough nor desperate enough, nor
as seemingly doomed and lost and lonely, as the
sounds of young men
naked prowling the night hiding their poems -- but, once the difference
has been pointed out to you,
and with just a little bit more attention to detail on your part, you should easily
be able to
tell the
difference.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem appeared in FUCK!, Vol 3, Number 1, January 2000.)