i woke up late
because in my dream
it was the weekend
and i was at home
eating a cantaloupe
while reading rimbaud
and not entirely sure what he was getting at,
though my wife kept nodding along
from one stanza
to the next,
so i suppose i should have understood
rather than being too tired to go to work
a language spoken whenever the curtains
are drawn with amateur pieces of artwork
meant to look and sound like people,
but poor facsimiles missing lines
that make the figures look monstrous,
otherworldly, nothing like how the figures perceive how they look,
though if we're being perfectly honest,
they sound perfectly coherent, so there's that...
little post-it notes floating in the air,
raining down with thoughts dried and bare
until there's nothing left of them
on the page,
except some random aside,
some little thought that intends to mean
but means so little under
the twilight, dwindling, thumb-sucking time frame
crunched out of existence
right before bed
Fred Aiken Writing 