Lullaby 🛌

I wrote this a long time ago. But I’m sharing this now because I think my world needs it. This is for The Miracle and The Anarchist who saved me this weekend. Thank you for being my lullaby.

Verse

Lullaby 🛌

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This is for you,
with the battle days and the war weeks,
learning to steal time away from
friends, family, lovers and yourself.
You feel like insomnia.
Sleep.
Sleep the sleep of alarm clocks, finally falling silent.

The digital numbers count off your life,
in deliverables and goals.
You are an eternal wait
for the next notification,
the upcoming announcement,
that long-awaited bell.
Sleep.
Sleep the sleep of airport lounges, wondering why don’t they just stop?

Chasing perfection,
plugging every pore
Put on a face. Keep up a face. Make a face.
Let’s face it.
Your life is a face,
and it’s sagging at the thought of tomorrow,
airbrushed with promises.
Sleep.
Sleep the sleep of an eye pencil turning full-stop into a beauty spot.

You, there.
Watching the world run.
Luxuriating in the ache of muscles that have never seen a gym.
Your life is a backdrop to other people’s dramas.
You keep it level for those of us who run.
You sleep.
Sleep the sleep of clean cotton sheets, dried stuck to the lines after a day of wash & sun.

You lie with a book,
or many, to forget.
Your eyeballs grease their way down someone else’s stories.
The skeleton in your closet turns into a boggart at night.
Let these words seek rhymes and snores.
Rhymes and snores.
Let them echo under one blanket. Your blanket.
Sleep.
Sleep the sleep of incomplete stories, lying silently between pages till it’s time to turn.

Maybe you only feel the prickles in your blanket,
the bumpy lumps of pain in your memory.
If you are stretched out on a bed too big for one,
its rumples matching the missing pieces of your heart.
As you learn to sleep alone again,
remember, you always did.
Sleep.
Sleep the sleep of extinguished lamps, long abandoned by their genies, finally at rest.

There is a day of wonder to get to.
And before that, this dark emptiness,
is YOURS
and yours alone.
So sleep. Sleep.
Sleep the sleep of the night sky, the same colour over everyone seeking refuge under it.

You sleep.

~O~O~O~O~O~O~

I performed this several times on stage. My favorite performance of LULLABY was for an UnErase event. I wish I had a better video than this. And for a slightly different style of the same poem, here’s a video.