The Beauty of Sleep
The Beauty of Sleep
I love the feeling of sleep
The beautiful high when first waking
And falling in and out of a morning rest.
I don’t think I’ll sleep when I’m dead.
To sleep is to rest
To rest is to restore
In death there is no restoration.
I feel my sleep
I dream my dreams
But in death there are no feelings or dreams
There is nothing much better to me
Than laying cuddled with a loved one
In the bliss of a morning where there is nothing to do
When the mind is not reeling
When the body’s not doing
This is the human animal
Enjoying its form and companionship
No goals
No desires
Only present sensations welcome.
There is nothing much more relaxing to me
Than sprawling on a bed or chair
Feeling the support of its frame
Letting my body know it can let go.
It has done its job
The muscles can loose their grip on the bones
The cartiledge can uncompress
The ligaments cease their stretching.
And like the body
The brain too.
I can let it go,
Off into the confines of anothers
Or into the limitless drift of my own.
Sometimes it is like I am without one.
Feels like I’m staring out from inside a corpse.
Or a mannequin.
Maybe I have returned from a run
Or have smoked too many drugs.
My body is too heavy to move
My nerves seem to fail me.
I think about picking up my arm
Or twisting my hips
Or shaking my legs
But I am trapped in the grips of comfort
To close my eyes and succomb to it is inevitable for me.
I love the sweet seduction of its warm dripping pool
I swim and luxerate in its bath knowing I’ll return to the shore.
Will I one day dip my head and find it deeper than I could ever know?
Diving down and down
Sinking beneath sleep into a creeping decay?
Maybe.
But I imagine it will be much dryer in death.
The pool and the shore will be drained
Me too.
Drained of anything and everything.
I hope this drain leads to some reservoir
Some basin where I can be recycled
Or even to reside there
In the depths of eternity.
But I do not think the drain goes anywhere.
More like erasure than evaporation.
I hope nature has in store for us
What it does with the raindrops
To take my trip from the sky to the earth
To wash across the land
Into the sea
And to be called up again
To enjoy the fall once more.