Triptych for the Lone Night Gods
and
too much time is spent on this
you only have so many hours
in a day you have to prioritise
because a third of this is sleep
or what now passes for sleep
splayed out on a firm mattress
that if you believe the adverts
is rippling with mites and bugs
of a microscopic nature and the
thin duck feather pillow plucked
pummelled down to submission
is fattened with sloughed skin
from your dried cheeks despite
the new moisturiser you bought
when you thought of your age
that long predictable cold front
the passing touch of someone
at the sandwich counter the
slight electric of a cooler hand
and
too much time is spent on this
so
as I said you can’t turn it off like a tap not this particular tap the washer has rotted and water keeps coming hitting the drum of the plastic bowl so you take out the bowl just for the sake of changing the pitch the yellow page plumber is busy for days and emergency call outs seem way too much for such a small thing such a common place thing the imprint of metal embeds in your hand as you turn it and twist it clockwise and tighter everyday fighting to make it all stop even then you know your logic is skewed but you need to do something to be in control to seem undefeated the sound stalks you to bed at 3.23 you hear it downstairs through two skins of wood long after the plumber the exorbitant cheque you lie in the silent stretch of your bed arms flung to edges catching ghosts dropping hollowing stigmata in the grasp of your hands as I said you can’t turn it off like a tap not this particular tap the water keeps coming keeps coming keeps coming keeps coming keeps coming keeps co
to bed
where sounds jump into bed like the old fridge
that shudders awake at 3am hums mmmmm
it can sense what I am failing to be this sleeper
lit up by the radio red half-life of the LED dial
the silent electronic tick prods the air my face
I can taste its finger in my mouth the sweet
deep colourant buzz of pick‘n’mix cola bottles
shrimps flying saucers fluorescent red lips
Sleep the star of the peep-show is downstairs
I can hear her watching TV a gaudy quiz show
time has become the slow smell of his neck
washed from these sheets both of us bedded
down in the back seat of a clapped out Fiesta
the fridge can’t see me now I have poked out
its eyes with a gherkin blind-folded the clock
mini- moto sparrows are just beginning to rev
I could throw a big cloth over the cul-de-sac
kid them its night double dark Mrs G’s budgie
the street’s pending the corner shop’s in-tray
being stuffed with The Sun sliced white bread
I am not asleep yet because Boise Idaho
Perth Australia Shanghai the Polar ice caps
are still awake drinking tea and talking to me
the Slumber land mattress whispers in my ear
horror stories of chicks eaten by fat hippos
I am exchanging fish recipes with penguins
telling trailer park trash about love in a box
this fog-bound grounded journey of sleep
takes me places I’ll never come back from
in my old Nelson blue geography text book
stalactites have to hang on tight I chanted
all of Mrs Hardy’s chalky lime-scaled sheep
rocked my flip-lid desk to sleep like a baby
the night is going to be pulled like a cracker
snapped useless debris no smell of cordite
just a cheap plastic dream a curled up motto
• Andrea Porter is a member of the poetry performance group Joy of Six that has performed in Britain and New York. She has been published in a number of poetry magazines (both paper and online) in the UK , Canada , Australia and USA . Her narrative sequence of poems Bubble was adapted for Radio 4 as a drama by the RSC playwrite Fraser Grace. She received an Escalator Award from the British Arts Council (East) and The New Writing Partnership in 2006 to complete a novel. She sleeps either too little or too much. www.joyofsix.co.uk