don’t sleep don’t sleep. don’t sleep. i am not done with this business of forming prayers. my hands are too empty opening and shutting somewhere outside you. don’t sleep, i cry, too dizzy for tears. my eyes open and close unable to choose between the emptied world or the cluttered darkness batting like semafores to the drunken rhythm of helplessness. it is slipping, the side of my head like mud crashing through my jail of ribs, burying the heart in rubble. a malformed engine belching from my stomach: don’t sleep. and the rest, once a shape, beside and against, spins through the turn of hours, turn of days unable to sense any passage forward anything but the push of your fingertips still tracing the words... once every nerve sang Don’t sleep! Don’t sleep! my flesh rose like a hundred suns and morning spread over you in deepening colors and i, coming inside you, farther than sound, the multidues of me spilling out like poems in an alphabet made of water, in a language only to be spoken by two tongues and afterward, with tired hands aside my shoulders you lowered yourself like mist the cooling points of your breast first on my chest then all softness spreading across me, legs framing mine. this perfect landscape is what my palms memorized. did i fear it then, the tide of love slipping away like some deathless hope? did i fear that dreams might replace this perfect wakefulness? still tracing the words... i lie, thinking there must be a way, an argument, an equation, a prayer to make things right again, to make Us again. i breathe and breathe, don’t sleep. don’t sleep. i cannot be done with this business of forming prayers. my hands are too empty opening somewhere outside you...