Night Mining

I never want to go to sleep again.  The only sleep I have any respect for is nap sleep, dog by my side, earplugs in, the rest of the world doing whatever it does all day—making noise, stirring up dust, laying out obstacles.  But then at night?  With them all asleep?  And I’m gonna put myself under?  I don’t think so.  It never gets more quiet than when everyone’s asleep.

~

It’s not that I never sleep.  I sleep plenty.  Sleep is the opposite of lust.  I feel it when I dream.  Heartbreak, heart moan, heart ruin.  Long, lost, and forlorn.  Shorn or unshorn, whichever is worse.  

~

I am just so in love with the world when I’m not hating it.  Look at all these people going by, look at the moon rise in the sky.  Let the road go by, cars like blinking ornaments.  My teeth are singing, headed in the direction of an early Christmas.

~

Do not let me go to sleep, do you hear me?  Do not let me go unto thy thought-faint catacombs!  Do not let me sleep along this distance, one-third of a mile, li.  

~

If I turn to the next hour, to the next day, to some space of my own—vodka—when I read something good it’s because it’s true and I want to share it.  Wake my wife, to tell it true?  No, let her sleep.  That’s what the vodka’s for.  And this pen.  The open face of the page.  Classical music.  My nether.  Where I’m spilling into, where I fit.

~

I can keep the gate but walk it back.  My security system is a piece of renewable floss.  Piano music, tapped out a hundred years ago, entertains me again tonight.  So much so that I might even be able to sleep.  

Magnets are anti-gravity hooks.  Hurricanes are house guests insisting on the driveway.  Ice cubes are brain freezes released in a glass.  Burnt ends are animal and smoke and fields of regret.  

Yes.  I can remember you there.  Eating cake at the sink in a camouflage dress.  I practiced rolling my rrrrrs just before falling asleep.

~

Is that a spotlight, a searchlight, a set light, or the moon?  I pray it’s not yet midnight.  I take a breath, put a finger to my phone.  11:59!  I wallow in the day’s denouement.

~

I’m still not knocked out after several Stags and a couple of stiff vodkas.  I could sleep but I just don’t want to.  Go for a walk?  At this hour?  No, I’ll just sit and write a while, write a mile, until the end of the line.

~

Our beds are what we sleep in.  I am wrecked as a rifled desk, twisted as a sideways sheet I don’t know is twisted.  I ponder the long mechanics of radio tubes tuned by set wrench.  I despair every night over one or two things.  Either I am done with this life, ready to end it.  Or I am beside myself that this life is going by so quickly, that there is nothing I can do to make it permanent, or else to slow it down.  That’s what I’m feeling tonight.  I will not go gentle into that good anything!

The only thing I know to do to try and make it right is to read, and to drink a lot of water.  That might help.  It might.

~

Why am I awake?  This is crazy.  I guess I’ll go to sleep tomorrow.  I never go to sleep today.  Really, though: I wield no power in the world.  What difference does it make what time I go to bed?

~

Another satellite.  The big companies are caging the sky with them.  For our own good, for the Internet.  But I don’t want them as my companion in the night.  And yet, as my gaze follows a screaming hulk of highly reflective material as it tears through space at however many miles an hour, I reach into my pocket for my phone, to see if anyone is reaching out to me, to ask what or how I’m doing, at this odd hour, looking up from Missouri, my feet on the ground, at zero miles an hour, my own personal space.

~

It will become the first night of many.  But I won’t ruin it with talk.  The wind is whipping, meteors are whizzing toward Orion.  Northern Ireland, northern lights.  Negotiate the Brexit some other night.

~

The raw, productive hours.  Night mining.  Does she hear the clank of the bottles, upstairs?

~

“Put that notebook down.  And go to bed.”

“No.  Never!”

~

I am awake again, in the middle of the night.  It’s become my favorite part of the day.  I accept the absence of the light.  I welcome the need to be quiet.  

It is these two restrictions, these two checks that have me putting pen to paper right now.  I am alert and willing, and, at this hour, what else is there for me to do?

I cannot run the vacuum.  I cannot clean dishes.  I cannot put dishes away.  I cannot rake leaves.  I cannot hoist a ladder in order to clean the gutters.  I cannot take the dog out because to do so would be to rile him up, which would wake and upset us all.

Therefore, no coffee, no tea, no food.  In this same way, there shall be no talking to myself, except perhaps in whispers—and also on this page.  

I run very little risk of becoming irritated, annoyed, cursing, or losing my temper.  I have no expectations for this moment, thus its tendency toward peacefulness, toward a feeling of contentment.  My breathing is slow; and, were I to check it, my blood pressure likely at its circadian low.

I have done a little reading.  I have jotted down a recipe for mushroom risotto.  A heavy truck air brakes on Hanley Road.  In this basement, even four houses in, the Doppler reverberates and I think about a flatbed truck carrying a large and heavy steel beam, requisitioned from some coke-warmed foundry a couple of interstate exchanges away.  The town of Clayton becomes the best heart of Clayton-St. Louis.  

A sip of the vodka and I become waxy.  Forgive me, Madame Tussaud.  My phone was about to die, the mushroom risotto recipe seems to have poisoned it.

“But they were only buttons and bellas,” I say quietly.

It is not quite a freeze tonight—this morning I should say, 2:11 on a Thursday morning, November the 8th in U City, Missouri, USA, dot com!

And what am I doing to mark the occasion?  Does anyone know?  Does it matter?  So what if the mushroom risotto leaves a rind on the large saucepan with a tight-fitting lid?  I can just scrub it off, open the tap, burn a little gas, dump it down the drain, flip on the garbage disposal, access the sewer main, and then swim a ways down the River des Peres, eh?

~

Three a.m.

“Can’t sleep?”

“Don’t want to.”

“Huh?”

“I’m awake, and I’m glad for it.  My mind is clear.  This is my quiet, productive hour.  Look at this essay I just read.  Look at these words I’m writing.”

~

3:41.  I am at the end of my course description.  Sing, Mr Armstrong, from that iPod above my head.  Sing, please, in the night.  It helps me get to where I’m feeling.  Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

~

What lives where I don’t, in the night?

~

As the night progresses, grips, and squelches, I duck behind available levee, move for continuance, legislate gerrymander, practice legerdemain.  I sniff nostrums and bootleg recommended music.  I mine my field to see what might be planted there.  

~

Calamari every day of the year.  I have myself in myself if only I could show it.  Ad: Man needs dog for catnap.  REM sleep is as easy, for you my dear, as turning on REM the band.  I tell myself I can get there by buying into confused states of consciousness.  But it never works.

~

Sleep is that dream-world of fantastic survival I first traveled to by movie.  Beetlejuice, Tremors, Dune.  Worms in the ground, churning sand and dirt, like roly-poly libraries downloading Alexandria into our brains at night.

~

I struggle to keep my eyes open.  Fine, then.  I will sign for the package of tomorrow right now, with reluctance.  Why must they bring it today?

~

Or maybe I’ll pop the bite guard in and write with m’eyes closed.  Nah.  This isn’t going anywhere.  I’ve got nothing.  I should just go to bed.

~

What time is it?  The windows fail to hold out the waxing light.  

~

For everyone, for everywhere, for tomorrow.  I utter this amalgamation without identifying its constituents.  I walk outside.  I am the last man standing.  Whose hat am I holding?  I shield my eyes from the dawn.  

~

See the stars that are left?  This close to sunrise?  The brightest ones, the landmarks?  Straight out.  Polaris is there, just barely, it’s always in the same place.  

In the east there is light but I can’t call it sunrise, even with the sky taking on that color, the orange and pink and violet of dawn.  The beauty in this moment is worth staying up for.  I’ll stand here a while longer, the stars will fade completely in lieu of Our Star, which will rise to trace the sky another day.  

Soon enough the whistles will move in, issued by waxwings, perched in the tip-top of the maple, awash in morning light.  The night sounds will take themselves away.  And then I will go inside, and then I will sleep