It’s often in these hours when things reach us most deeply, maybe it’s not, maybe it’s time to talk about myself or perhaps I should just be writing in a journal, one of those salty old books that line the walls of this dark hold, sitting on rotting boards, rotting themselves in the humid air, this ship is full with holes and though the water comes in every night like a tide somehow we stay afloat, somehow I sleep when I do, though on nights like this one it’s hard to believe that my mind has ever been quiet, it’s hard to believe that the stars could ever stop moving or just burn out, but they do, many have already, I know that I have slept before because I can see so clearly dreams I have had and all of the ones who have met me there, alive or dead in the light now or the dark of some continent I cannot touch,  I know I have slept, though tonight it eludes me, whale-like it’s song rising from the deep of my bones, echoing in my restless flesh, my ear pressed to the cool floorboards, there’s water beneath them, there must be, tonight, when sleep is a demon I’ve fallen in love with and yet can’t lure back into the bed, tonight, when sleep is the memory of dancing with you beneath the house your grandfather’s grandfather built with his hands in a land whose name your family can no longer pronounce, so deep in the earth that night alive in the ether of darkness and touch and nothing not the loudest footsteps or the earthquakes on china pouring from the boards and bursting like chinese mortars on the ribs of that ancient floor could have stirred us, nothing could have shaken us from our moorings, set sail again with me, cast off the heavy beams of sleep or waking, of work that is not the work of your spirit and leave this place where animals no longer speak and all of daemons are locked up in stories, I can’t sleep tonight because maybe the world has gotten too heavy even for Atlas to hold, a time of great reckoning is approaching and quickly, soon the sun will kiss us sweetly while passing from this side of the world to the other, night and day will be each other’s match only that moment and we will slip yet again out of the grace of long days on the hot decks of our imagination and into the half of life where darkness holds the keys and our ability to live in it, spells that create light rather than swallow it, will mean more to us than the air beneath the swallow’s short, curved wings, “come back to bed, my love” you’ll sing to me, “finish with tonight’s devils, fold your body into mine and sleep.”