Insomnio

La noche es viento solitario y estrellas calladas.
Un perro ladra.
The sound of summer crickets & solitary cars.  A drunkard burps in false contentment.
The whole night is
content.
An expanse of city seeped in shadow & then; an infinite blanket of sea blending
Into a blind horizon, where the blackness flutters & drinks.
And I can not see the moon, nor the sunken ships,
Nor all the men fast asleep….whether in the bodegas, or the brothels, or their beds-
Nor the lost city of Plato’s Atlantis and the promise of civilization,
Nor the immaculate lives of whales lived under the Atlantic,
Nor the coast of Africa a few miles before me, nor all of my life’s lovers laid out before me,
But a volcano is there behind me
& I’m melting in surrenderence to the hallowed poetry of Manana.
The hollow night is carved inside me, waiting.
Tomorrow I have lived for 20 years,
Dumbfounded & drenched in enough stories to fill one thousand & one nights with words, but
to put the totality of something I can not comprehend nor grasp quite simply:
Life is small, malleable, & temporary ecstasy
(often unrealized)
Life is Sex & Sadness and sweet things that can not last
(completely taken for granted, then gone.)
My life is clay from the rivers of my childhood, in the maestro’s hands of Time.
My life is all I could ever Hope for, and that which came to pass.
& the hollow night’s still carved inside me, waiting.