"Insomnia"

Insomnia grips me again tonight, and I feel my feet restless and moving beneath me, leading me into the dark summer night, onto these city streets in search of the talisman of slumber. I slink around these neighborhoods like a shadow. I know them so well, know their unmarked boundaries like my own face; Know them so well that I can straddle them, and have my ass in two places at once. This is the shit that keeps me awake. My brain firing constantly with senseless chatter. This night, I find myself in Fremont under the highway with a concrete troll. His hubcap of an eye glinting in the sideways light of the lamppost. I am frozen in front of it in some strange fear. It creeps me out in the darkness with my brain spent, and my vision blurry with ataxic movements. I’m seeing shit that isn’t there, and the din of the highway above my head is deafening, and vibrates my body Like a lullaby. It makes me want to lay face down on the pavement and sleep like a bum, but I am stabbed with the sound of screeching tires and voices, the thud of a body being dumped to the street, the dull thumping of heavy shoes crushing ribs and flesh. My fear slides me behind the pylon that holds up the highway, I’m afraid to look at the body in the road, afraid of my cowardice, afraid of seeing myself, but I look anyway, because insomnia says I can. He is there in the road, His shirt a white glowing light on the blacktop. I close my eyes and breathe And he is gone. I walk to where he was beaten like a dog to find a small pool of sticky blood, and I feel crazy at this moment, crazy enough to go to sleep. Aleathia Drehmer 2006 Published by Zygote in My Coffee #72