isomnia

 Insomnia. 17 February 2024.

Listening to the dark 

I hear my heart

Beating it's fist against the wall

Of my rib cage, as if to  say

I'm alive and heed me always : 

The arrow of time makes the wind

Turn colder in late winter

And now is the time 

I might stop to rest without 

Asking you 

So my eyes stay snapped open 

In featureless space 

Above and around me 

Quiet and blank as an immersion tank

But if this is all the time I have

Then I want the doors of my mind 

To swing open tonight,

Finally

Just for once

So I might see what lies beyond

The familiar veil of daybreak

And the rhythms of mortal life

Would I ascertain 

That like the wind

I do not cease but merely

Turn a corner and go

To explore another forest

Another mountain top

A labyrinth of streets ?

But nothing happens as usual

So I put on Robert Plant with my headphones 

Singing 'Going to California '

The guitar notes tumble and glide like 

The play of light and shadow 

On a river at evening

And he uses 

 that old gesture and the eerie scream

As though hinting, below the story he tells

Of the stirrings of  other things 

Things that dance

Below the rhythm of dark and daylight

Life and it's passing

Oyr cat visits me, a white ghost

Soundlessly plumped against my chest

She rumbles quietly 

Keeping me company

Honouring my solitude with hers

But I turn ceaselessly and finally

She gives up and moves away 

Not to abandon me as such but 

To keep to a familiar, reassuring pattern

She understands that the night

Is for staying awake and brooding

And my life's companion lies

Breathing gently

Turned away from me in blessed sleep

Her body a deeper shadow in the darkness

And the night owl calls one more time

Before the dawn breaks. 

Mrs Alzheimer

She calls me in the cold dark morning
From five thousand miles away
I hear the mobile chirrup and my heart
Knots with the familiar slight dread
I hear her voice harsh as a crow's foot
Scraping a dead branch in winter snow
'Get me out of here!' she cries
'Get me out now or I will be dead soon!
They have kidnapped me!'
I can see her rolling eyes
And her mouth twisted in an old face
But I cannot help; the time is long gone.

The Sparrow

So strong are we to fly in fighter planes

A hundred miles above the fleecy clouds

The world below is surely lost to sight

We turn the metal engine of our might

And bank into the sun at dizzy speed

Above us all is blank and heavenly blue

Victorious, soaring, man exults anew

With each sortie through the airy deep

Yet cannot we launch blithely from the ground

With wingèd arms outstretched above the grass

And veer across the gilded meadow green

A hundred feet above the crumbly ground

As does a dappled sparrow in the hedge

This I dreamed when I was just a child

And this is still my futile dream today

To be as like a sparrow on the wing

To be released from all of our invention

Simply fly as does the little bird

And seek a worm upon the sunlit ground

Arjun L. Sen

2010

The Librarian

I borrowed The Great Gatsby
From my own Library
Where I work
Knowing that I won't read more
Than a few pages at night
Before I sleep exhausted

Why did I borrow this book?
Perhaps for its cover showing
A photograph in sepia of lovers
In untroubled bliss
Or so it seems
And so it may as well seem
As I somehow know
It will not get read
So long as my eye watches the clock
Tick away the hours of
My exhausted heart
While I work my life away
At my desk

If Only

I look out of the window and think
If only
And yet the mountain is indomitably
Sharp-grained
The sky as blue and bright
As a child's painting
Now is all we have
Then why am I sad?