Another Poem on Beds

Yesterday I failed to recollect that I had another poem involving a bed which I hadn't posted, and thus, in the interests of truth in recollection I provide it for you today, unpublished, once workshopped, written a little over a year ago when Kathleen and I were stuck near San Diego for several months on a tiny full-size bed, naturally uncomfortable, in a week-to-week rental of a studio cottage, not that I'm complaining, as it was much better than being homeless.

Here goes:



(After Life)

I have forgotten how to sleep.
The shock cords of my ligaments
and poles of my bones
belong to that bargain tent
you can never get back in the bag.

Like the fossil of a pterodactyl
impossibly mangled in rock
I groove the mattress,
arranging and rearranging
the angles of my skeleton
until exhaustion intervenes.
I do not call it sleep.

I resent the hell out of gravity.
My wife says I twitch all night.
When I wake to find her on the couch
I blame my lumbering ancestor,
the lobefin fish,
for the second great mistake.



At Rodent Neutral,

Thine,

CE

p.s. The pain of the poem above has been much ameliorated by the Magic Bed II.