The two a.m. moonlight slinks around   
restless as a rat in a counting-house. 
Its slim blue snout sniffs the building
where sleep hides out. The red-eyed 
master of ceremonies feels more like 
Occupant, and takes due note. The whole place, 
house and grounds, is bathed in creepy glow 
that shines along the pool, and everything 
feels all set to sail away. 

Right-now—the gasping present— 
sits beyond. Yet functions as the whole. 
As everywhere. It isn’t working, 
though it’s not in disrepair. It is lint 
from Buddha’s navel, it is parings of the moon, 
the light-trails of the no-fish swimming in not-ocean 
beneath the un-ship due to sail away too soon. 

Could the whole thing— edifice, glare, 
the insomniac’s old aches and unshed tears— 
have somehow worked loose from habit’s mooring? 
 
What sleep should do is take a bath. 
A blue-light bath on winter hills. 
Let blue memories unseal the past 
like fish laid on the counter top, 
eyed by the waiting scaler. 
Dawn will eat up everything, 
its hot light crisping the edge of the ridge, 
that arc-of-flight at which we gasp in wonder, 
determination, recognition.

In this deadlocked hour it's all too plain  
how mankind scrabbles over the planet skin, 
dragging myopia like a dead tail. 
Fishing in the dark, all the while 
feeding on guilt and nightmares.  

Though we fit into the scheme of things,  
we aim ultimately back toward silt, 
like all the rest. (It is imperative  
we learn to flap those wings.)