Someone’s alarm screams out a warning, but it is too late. I am reluctantly stolen from my slumber,
body heavy from the weight of sleep’s absence,
mind brooding, groggy and sullen,
as I am hurled back onto the barren,
unmerciful landscape of a world
that insidiously creeps and seeps
into the thickened skin and its many hidden crevices, an all-too-deluminating light
of encumbrant necessity and sense-ability.
And who is the keeper of this house?
Neither Mother, Lover, Father, Sister, Brother
or Friend, nor any of our kin,
but the Brother of Sleep,
so avariciously omnipresent as we weigh
the costs of survival,
while Life itself extorts without us.
And so the work is neglected,
and we see that there is no way
to stop the accounting
without soon running out of red ink,
to remind us of our debts.
Yet the overseer has still kept us intact,
and we are at least assured that as long
as there is blood running hot and fast
beneath our skin,
the books will remain in balance,
and we will remain ever fatally noble
and upright in our figurings,
until the costs of survival
reach their final recompense
in Death.
Until that celestial overseer of all
decides he can live in indigence with us no longer,
and he sends the Brother of Sleep to keep us,
the mortal enemy and forbidden lover
of the Life we had so carelessly spent,
trying to merely preserve.
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