Sleep

by Trina Tan

It is the limbo between the parentheses
of waking up or living.
People say it is some sort of conjured darkness,
of time lost, of things foregone,
of winter’s cold joy and bears hibernating.
People say it is for the weak.
They forget that just as we feed into the strains of our eyelids
to keep up the quick erratic breathing
and the litheness of our feet
we need to feed into the silence of our deafening
imagination
and the need for our feet to step off the ground
for a while longer than a second.

So it lies between us, the illuminating darkness,
an entity with limbs, the barometer of health we overlook.
The slight twitching of our hands against each other
triggers off earthquakes in an unknown somewhere.
We feed into a cache of things unremembered,
things we forget to believe when we are awake.
And as we dream, it grows,
enveloping us with the fabric of sewn-together
joys and tragedies,
filling the gaps that the air has left
between the curves of our bodies
and the roundness of our souls.

The bears, they wake up,
rubbing off the remnants of their dreams
which had crystallized in the corners of their eyes
as if reality had gone on its knees to beg for some.