'The 4AM Wonder-Room'
(13 notes from 20 odd years of sleeplessness)

1. It's like pulling at a long rooted, rotted molar. All systems
down, disconnected -- everything known is forgotten. Just a cipher
in a dead man's pajamas. There is no hope in this cream colored
room astride this barge of a bed.

2. Walking broken, the half-dead sensation. Murky room.

3. Bone is dark and every aches. No muscle speaks. No webs no
sense no networks.

4. Bolts seizures splits fissures

5. What nameless something are you at the end of that chewed rope?
Having worn all the green away in a gritty circle fretting. No
bristle or growl, just sweat and stumble.

6. Sleeping under slate blankets, sleeping under ice blankets,
sleeping under chalk blankets.

7. Tiptoeing like Nosferatu's sister to scribble these rat sad
tracks. Brakes sound like barking. Jets sound like thunder.

8. Dummies and nulls?

9. Have you seen this hole I look into? Look down into too much of
the same not much seen because of fogs and inertia. What time is
it now? Is this pasts dragging or lives to come? Is there any
infusion, any tincture that will help with the goddamn go-on?

10. Clubfoot & Cripple Hand wear mohair straightjackets.

11. In the hard middle of night's nowhere the tinnitus hisses.
Losing the silence; those ghost voices on a clean reel of tape.
That hallucinating dictation that cranked me up is far long away
gone.

12. Keep lay down down keep pray to down my. Now lord pray the
sleep to my soul I. Sleep keep sleep the lay sleep pray to me.

13. This is a landscape of dead trees, burning, liver-aching
winds, ash and trash and muttering voices of disapproval. A puny
chaos that stops me dead. Please let me hold out my hands again to
humor, playfulness and fluttering, stuttering grace.


-Holly Anderson


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