That point in the night
when you want to say something
right but you’re too tired.
—
A haiku’s too hard
when your brain’s got no more cards
to play but madness.
—
A frigid, simple
rhyme will take no more time than
deadened syllables.
Tag Archives: night
Strange Sleep
8 Apr
My brain is a very weird place. Like, very, very, very weird. Possibly also still a bit scrambled right now, seeing how I haven’t downed any coffee yet this morning. But hey. We’ll deal with it.
So, how weird is my brain? Well, when not deciding that I was going to be awake at weird hours and then sleep in a very nonsensical pattern last night, my brain was off in who-knows-what-land spinning incredibly odd dreams. Usually, I’m able to figure out what the stimulus was when I have particularly strange sleephaunts. An advertisement I saw on the Metro, something a friend said, a line from a book…
Yeah. Not so much this time.
I mean, my roommate and I did watch the lump of slap-happy confusion that is Zoolander last night, so maybe that was the impetus for my brain’s thinking that ooh! ooh! it could come up with absolute ridiculousness too!
What was last night’s brand of weirdness? Well, all within less than eight hours of shut-eye, I lived through a Star Trek-themed nightmare (neither Spock nor Captain Picard graced my dream with his presence, though) that was also slightly Monster’s Inc.-esque; I was Disney’s Pocahontas in an alternative history where I got to just hang out with John Smith and tell him he was boring; I was told via phone that the head of the tribe had died and so I (still Pocahontas) had to lead a group of other Native American aristocracy through a mine field where we were being attacked by flying frisbee-ish weapon technology; still as Pocahontas, I fought Malfoy from the Harry Potter books; and then in a completely different dream sequence, I was nanny to the Obama family’s young daughter (who in my dream was like 3 and a very unruly child); that dream somehow involved reality that was hybridized with video game graphics and clicking; and then finally that dream somehow connected back to the Pocahonatas one and the Chinese were going to try to attack through plants or something and I had $25 million that came from a fraud transaction and thus couldn’t gamble but it wasn’t my fault…
You all as lost as I am by now? Geez. There’s a reason I wake up exhausted…
Any of you lovely readers have a comparatively weird night? Hope you all managed a more restful pre-work Tuesday morning.
Brains are weeeeeird, man.
Ahem. I’m going to go drink some coffee now…
Insomniac Poetry
16 Jan
Happy Thursday, my lovely readers. So, I’ve been scribbling about in the Twittersphere a fair amount recently – the 140 character limit on writing a meaningful blurb/poem is a provocative challenge, and it’s nice to be able to throw shorter thoughts like haikus or couplets or quotes out to the world of internet readers without having to scrounge up something as official as a blog post to do it.
Anyhoo. As many of you might know, the sleeping and I, we don’t exactly have the smoothest of relationships. “Oh, what’s that? You’re done with work and writing for the day and want to get an adequate amount of shut-eye? Then how about I fill your brain with ALL THESE THINGS YOU MUST CYCLICALLY THINK ABOUT IT!!!” *cue maniacal laughter*
Yup. My circadian rhythms and I really need to have a peace summit or something one of these days.
But, seeing as right as I’m trying to fall asleep is apparently one of times that I mind-spew poetry and the beginnings of other writings, I’ve decided that rather than futilely wait until morning to write down the 1% that I’ll have remembered from what I thought of just before slipping off into dreamland, sure, I’ll just postpone my going to bed for another five minutes or so (*cough cough two hours cough cough*) and jot down those haikus my brain is generating like there’s no tomorrow through a couple to half a dozen tweets or so.
Yeah, pretty sure most of my Twitter activity logs between 11 pm and 3 am. Woooo sleep disorders.
But, one writer’s sleep issues is another reader’s free poetry! So, in case you haven’t stumbled upon it already and also happen to be awake and trawling the virtual world for verse at two in the morning (or, you know, wanna check for updates that will still exist in their digital entry in my Tweet feed at a more reasonable hour…), just wanted to give y’all a heads up that you can find the poetry (mostly haikus) that I write late at night under the hashtag #insomniacpoetry. Oh yeah, my whatever-the-fuck-you-call-a-twitter-“at”-username (handle? I think that’s the term the UI folks picked…) is @MicealaShocklee.
Just because, here are a couple of insomniac poems I’ve written over the weeks past:
Haikus for Quiet Sleep
Silence is the best
kind of poetry for an
insomniac’s night.
Darkness is the best
kind of poetry for an
insomniac’s mind.
Haiku for Words That Won’t Let Me Sleep
A cacophony
of overlapping phrases
circles in my brain.
unnamed poem
I can’t sleep and my heart’s a bit bruised,
so I’ll write poetry.
Sometimes in life, we make such substitutions.
Lovely readers, here’s to all our waking dreams.
Orion
10 Jan
It’s odd, that Orion the Hunter would be my favorite constellation. That I would have in me a love for something so strange to my nature.
Perhaps it’s because he was the first constellation I was ever able to pick out from the night sky on my own. Perhaps it’s because if he is in the sky, then I can always find him. Perhaps it’s because I just know that he’s there, know the stars that outline his existence. He is familiar. And that is comforting.
It’s odd, how sometimes things so different, so contrary to ourselves are what we cling to, because they are familiar.
Or perhaps I do find a kindred spirit, beyond the acts, in the man the gods put in the sky. He is a Hunter – but in more ways than one, I am too.
We just hunt different things. He seeks animals that are not lost. I seek the animal that I am to become.
But both of us, when we find those things, devour them.
Voraciously.
Quill Aquiver 