Cole Verses the Netherworld: A Week Without Sleep.

And now that week was gone,
That week without sleep,
That week of one night rest and working the next.
For eight days.

We walked the streets,
Sam and I,
A celebration of semi-somnambulation.
There were things we were doing,
The silent sounds of the concert behind us,
A friend’s concert where no one had recognized me,
The expat woman grabbing me
And using me as a human shield against the guard’s
Tennis balls,
The groceries in my hand,
A hazelnut pudding for me,
A peach Freeze for Sam,
But it was the walking that mattered.

The walking and the questions,
The odd queries punctuating our conversation,
“Do you think a ‘Hello Pineapple’ backpack would sell?”
“Why ‘Hello Pineapple’?”
“Because I saw a pineapple.”

When we got home we made pasta.
We had gone shopping
Because there was nothing to eat,
We had not bought pasta,
But when we got home we made pasta,
I guess that’s how these things work.

Minority Report was on TV.
It was on TV because Sam put it there
Using the USB drive
That he stuck in the Play Station controller port.
A real discovery that.
It seemed an appropriate movie.
It seemed long.

And then it turned violent,
The sleep that consumed me,
And when I tried to awake it perused me,
Reaching out of slumber and grabbing at my face,
Grabbing at my clothes, my nose,
Reaching round and pulling me down,
And then I was back in the apartment.
But not the apartment that was,
The apartment that should have been.
It was large and every door hid another room,
A room with three beds
Or a balcony of nothingness
That extended eight stories down
To the ground two stories below.
The front was modern,
White sterile walls,
IKEA kitchen ,
Sleep Comfort beds.
But as you moved to the rooms in the rear
They transformed into antique
Four posters,
Dark wood,
And slanted attic ceilings.

And LuLu was their,
With her strange men.
They kept coming and coming,
And I knew them all,
And that made them stranger.

And I could jump,
Oh God could I jump.
I could leap and bound and spring and vault,
Hop and hurdle, soar and summersault.
No furniture could match me.
No railing was too high.

And this reality was mine,
And I would have it!
Once I awoke,
And I was pressing the pillow
So hard into my eyes I could feel
My contacts scraping my corneas.

I peered in the mirror in the morning,
A couple of pin-prick scabs on my forehead
Flared red and inflamed from the friction,
Faint bruising ran round one eye
And down the center of the same cheek.

Over an hour has passed,
And I’m still not sure I’m free.