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Beauty Sleeping

by Kim Peter Kovac

Submerged on a bed, bleary brain vacillates
in a hallucinatory haze, in, out, & around
a gallimaufry of garbled images & thoughts,

spiderwebbed with neon clichés snapping
on/off as well. Edit. Revise. Edit. Trim. Cut.
A blue pencil whirls in the sea (soup? swirl?)

of wordswordswords. Was I a writer once?
Why are my dreams (dreams?) rife with words?
Semi-awake, harsh white walls surrounding,

patches glued to my skin, multicolored wires
snaking to shiny menacing machines:
numbers, graphs, lines, arrhythmic

chorus of clicks and beeps. Struggling
against belts strapping me down, memory
lights up again: therapy sessions to grok

my wilding dreams and writer’s block.
Dr. Jacob Grimm is a Jungian trafficking
in archetypes, Morpheus and such—

not a Freudian with stupid-ass couch
and sexsexsex. During my 6th session,
lost in word-streams, abruptly a needle

appears and skin-pops my finger, drug
arriving in arteries, coursing & spreading
up toward my brain, tingling marking

the passage till I plunge into deep sleep.
Over days (weeks? months?), am lorded
by the same Grimm, now a somnologist

documenting my dream-narratives in short
segments on his podcast. Ambien patches
speckle skin, lack of writing tools & paper

empowering his theft of my history
and stories and publish them as his.
I must sabotage this scheme and flee:

burst myself out of this sleep-state,
rein in all the wordsimages, herd
them into place, reclaim them as mine.

This is the beauty part.

from A Bit Left of Straight Ahead by Kim Peter Kovac (The Poetry Box, 2024)
nominated for The Pushcart Prize by Shawn Aveningo Sanders, editor/publisher

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