The Long Night’s Journey into Day

Night is a mirror lying on its back.

To wake is to resurface. Think

dreamer as deep see diver.

You say I love you to someone

you’ve no memory of having known.

Is this how we meet ourselves?

Night is a journey into mountains by car,

a vehicle someone else is driving

while we lay immobile in the back seat

barely able to lift our heads.

Why trust where we are being taken?

Why not?

I once read that all our memories

are reconstituted by one's own longing.

If so, our mothers are knit together,

faded throws made from borrowed yarn.

Our fathers, long having forgotten

how to be men, wait at

the crossroads, weathered scarecrows

oblivious to the sky.

Here’s what we need to know:

The tyrant is you.

The angel is you.

Your dog is you.

The bully is you.

Your friend is you.

You sing every song

you bare witness to,

if only from the inside.

Dredged from a hole in the ice

you return to a world of babbling boxes,

where toilet paper is made to resemble clouds,

where decorating your home is sheer autobiography,

where everyone carries their own remote controls,

where the loudest become dog whistles for the weak-minded,

where the sky is no longer free to gaze up at,

where our trash is swept under a rug of ocean water,

where we buy flowers for the privilege of watching them die,

where those who built this country are discarded,

defiled statues dropped from a great height.

Where artists are expunged for exorcising their sins in public,

as the body stores its fears and sorrows in its bones,

where churches slowly lose their sanctity

due to their lack of sunlight,

and history is made from the faulty memories

of an unreliable narrator returning home

from another dream of war.

Now

let your peace begin.

12/25/23