A Cure for Daylight
I wake up like this all the time,
my hand trailing through the air above me,
like it’s touching water from a canoe.
All the time.
Then, it’s over--
a second later I’ve forgotten
what it was like to witness my limbs
being pulled on by dreams,
like hungry children demanding more bread.
I have nothing left to give them but this body,
broken as it is,
caught, between this world and another,
unable to pay for the food they pedaled me in the night;
rooms and fields and palaces,
my waking eyes have never seen,
monsters I watched from a distance, measuring me,
and I them. The party snowed in,
prisoners held by the storm in a house
with a thousand rooms,
the children I saved and who saved me,
the dogs barking, the houses that burned,
the flights missed and taken.
If only there was a cure for daylight,
I would return to those rooms of gilded mirrors
and fresh cut roses, to the boy
who took my hand,
and while we waited
for the war to begin,
laid his head upon my knee.