I'm sleeping a hundred broken sleeps. I don't know where this begins or where this begins or where it ends. The early morning sky is a luminescent orange-purple, on the darker side, like midnight with a distant mass fire lighting the horizon. There are always dogs. Sometimes I have nowhere to sleep, and my legs are stretched painfully every which way to accommodate them. Doesn't really matter as I am half-conscious and drifting from one dream to the next, always in some transient state of mind, vague and non-existing worries taking my head back and forth from one trip to the next. I become one of them in sleep, kicking my legs, mumbling one thing or another, switching from one awkward position to the next, understanding what is there, and not understanding it, always in different ways each time. Where is my goddamn cat? She sleeps curled in a ball next to my head and rarely disturbs my sleep. But not tonight. Tonight are the large dogs with their large displacements.
The night is a like a midnight car drive through a tunnel cut into a mountain, the amber lights illuminating the interior in intervals, rapid, but broken.
The black one is like some large, lupine child. He exclaims wordless things in a voice of his own, and he flops into my arms in the middle of the night, heavy and attention-hungry. I only playfully wonder if he maybe thinks of this comfort he has, and what it might have been like had she not picked him up off of the mean LA streets.
I've come out of the tunnel for a brief moment of clarity out there with the soft blaze sky. Now to go back in...into the oscillating lights, the oscillating illuminations of here, and somewhere else.
