Frog-Eyed and Squeaking Like a Bat

To a degree of existential reprehensibility, I’m sure,
I search for sense: i.e., as I bob up and down
all night and cobble swatches of sufficient sleep
together to begin to weather hints of prospects
of another day, I search for plausible effects
and causes – reach a bug-eyed pause at
half-past-two or three, for which the only possible

salvation is pre-dawn TV: low-volume PBS rehauls
of college courses – on, say, Trojan Horses,
Pennsylvania, schizophrenia, Ancient Chinese Art,
or whether light is particle or wave – and as I let
their varied whitish noises softly and voluminously
rave, my flesh colludes with psyche to behave as if it
had just then begun to have received permission

to begin the run to its most treasured sweet oblivion:
I plunge from anxious wakefulness into the deepest
oddest sweep of sleep through which varieties
of cobbled creatures swim and creep: two solid hours
of extravagantly tooled and rendered jeweled
accompaniment: after which, frog-eyed and squeaking
like a bat, and manifesting other mild imponderables

not perhaps at all like that, I re-emerge and meet
the verge of what we call awake. Reprehensible
indeed to think that I might shake some reason
out of this, create a therapy with which to foster
making sleep invariable bliss: but one must try:
contract intractability and make it fly: affectionately
entertain infinity: prod it like a toddler: “why?”




.