A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Tag Archives: sleep
PROMPT: Bedtime
Whenever I want. Now that I’m all grow’d up.
But I do tend toward the lark end of the lark – owl continuum.
Water Sound [Haiku]
Wee Hours War [Lyric Poem]
Cat Dandy [Kyōka]
White-Out [Free Verse]
Skittish Dreams [Free Verse]
I don't remember my dreams --
not in the middle of the night
and not in the morning.
But, sometimes, I catch a glimpse
at a random instant:
composing a poem,
reflecting on a passage
from a book,
eating a cracker...
But my dreams are like
frightened animals,
turning my attention
directly upon them,
makes them skitter off...,
vanishing into the thicket.
My dreams vanish like they
were never really there,
and I am left wondering
just what I saw.
The harder I try to remember,
the more severely I scrub
my mental hard drive,
purging all shapes and motions,
until my recollection is nothing
but a vague residue of feeling.
I don't KNOW that it was a dream.
I couldn't swear to it.
All I know is that it's an image
that I can't tie to my waking life,
can't tie to any person, place,
or thing I know to be real.
(And, often enough, it's an image
that couldn't exist in the real world.)
I couldn't remember it as a dream,
but - somehow - I intensely FEEL
that it was a dream,
but the Dream is deep down in its hole,
shaking like a critter that
was almost snatched up by
a monster too awful to
contemplate....
and, somehow, I am that monster.
PROMPT: Lark or Owl?
Morning, definitely.
PROMPT: Sleepless
If you didn’t need sleep, what would you do with all the extra time?
Probably the same stuff. I’m reminded of Parkinson’s Law that states that activities [ie work] expand to fill the time allotted. Plus, there would still be mental housekeeping tasks to be done. It’s not like sleep is just wasted time (contrary to popular belief.) There is a great deal of important stuff that gets done in body and brain during sleep. If you think your memory is bad now…
So, if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll keep my sleep. I don’t think it’ll make the slightest difference in losing work to AI. (John Henry folklore notwithstanding.)
PROMPT: Lazy Days
Rested. Definitely. I believe one has to think of rest and recovery as part of the process of living. If one thinks of it as just wasting time between “doing things,” then one isn’t going to get the most out of body and mind.






