Last Sleep Best Sleep<\/p>\n
Brenda Shaughnessy<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Life, this charade of not-death.
\nAmnesiac of our nights together,<\/p>\n
overheard talking in some other voice.
\nThe great fruits of my failure:<\/p>\n
silk milk pills with little bitter pits.
\nWho talks like that? Says we are<\/p>\n
ever-locked, leaving everything
\npetalled and veined the way nature<\/p>\n
pretended. Synthesized within
\nan inch of its life. O the many faces<\/p>\n
of facelessness, breathing in the dark\u2014
\nas if we could shape softness itself,<\/p>\n
mold it around us like yams mashed
\nagainst a trough by a snuffling snout.<\/p>\n
Our own. There\u2019s no way out. Born
\nto such extra, we are born to lose.<\/p>\n
No hairy fingers tapering to threads,
\ngrasping for some lost last use.<\/p>\n
Once we were hungry on earth,
\nsoon buried like root vegetables\u2014<\/p>\n
to starve the soil as beets do,
\ngrowing in our graves.<\/p>\n
But now we must remember
\nour way back to face-to-face,<\/p>\n
to eye to eye and hand in hand,
\nand lock and step and key in hole.<\/p>\n
Remembering how not to fall asleep,
\nwe become so desperately drowsy,<\/p>\n
and all cells strain to slow to a stop.
\nAll desire to choose otherwise quiets.<\/p>\n
No, no one can say we didn\u2019t suffer,
\nthat we weren\u2019t swallowed whole.<\/p>\n
—————————————————–<\/p>\n
About This Poem<\/p>\n
\u201cThis poem is about failure. How we fail to live (if to live means to live fully, with awareness, connected to all things, in moments not striving to capture them or make them add up to something), how we fail to die (what is buried nourishes root vegetables, trees, air; our words spark in others, or they could, if we could only do it right), and how we let desire triumph. We want and we endlessly wish for. We suffer for that, but it\u2019s a failure I can live with, and hope never to lose.\u201d
\n\u2014Brenda Shaughnessy<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n