Emily Warzeniak lives and writes in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is an artist, poet, and scientist currently attempting to survive the unforgiving climes of the New Mexican desert.
Ode to Somnolence
By Emily Warzeniak
Outside glass windowpanes the sunset softly caresses you,
The shift and the bustle of city fades,
And the momentum of daily life trundles off into the night,
Wandering erratically as the streetlight’s shadow,
Flitting in the silhouette of a thousand sycamore leaves.
All life is a gamble
A trick of the light
A schizophrenic birdsong
Amends we never meant to make right
Thunder grumbles like a hungry god,
The summer’s salivation hangs poignantly in the air
Waiting to drop heavy like the bloody chaff of harvest moon.
To love is madness,
And no clear sanity exists.
The bipolarity of truth
Remains the only tryst of passion.
When you lay in the settling twilight dust,
Only the silence remains as floating company.
The quiet and the dark remind you of home,
And the television glow of the window
Keeps the reality of it somehow distant from you.
You are thankful for this.
On knife’s edge rides the morning,
Twixt borderlines of war,
A human’s animal desire to be loved,
Caught in complexity’s lie of “more.”
The quiet weeping of rainfall is intermittent,
Interspersing brooding thoughts with loving interjection.
The rustling of tree leaves takes you backward in time,
With their light hypnotic as the lullaby never sung
But by imagination’s sweet and gentle voice.
Between high and lies over cliff’s edge
An eternally stretching distance to fall,
Whose descent mocks the narcissist
And our determined need to crawl.
I am the moonlight. I am the bed.
But no force awakens me or can tear me from this leaden soul,
Or my affair with the solemn death.
It is no more real than time’s ticking,
And yet the temporal tides ripple doggedly outward, indefatigably on,
And I with it…
I am the canary,
Too honest in my sorrow,
Clinical as the knife,
Dissecting an unknowable tomorrow.
I am no more in my beloved windowpane as the sleeping decay of bed.
No comfort lies in the abandonment of time,
And no solace in the reality so far from dreaming.
Flee before the truth, my pet,
There is no greater good,
No plan to save us all,
No place we have not stood.