“A Slumber did my Spirit Seal” by William Wordsworth [w/ Audio]

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.

PROMPT: Bedtime

Daily writing prompt
What time do you go to bed and wake up currently?

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]

the sound of rain
and thundering waterfalls:
a cat sleeps soundly.

Wee Hours War [Lyric Poem]

The dogs were in a wee hours war:
Growling and snapping and howling,
Breaching night's plutonian shore,
And sweet dreams those barks were fouling.

What monstrous dreamland incursions
That yapping must have brought about.
Bucolic scenes turned perversions
Of bared teeth and menacing snout.

Cat Dandy [Kyōka]

cat on a porch rail
preens between naps
 to look good
for the twenty waking
 minutes of its day. 

White-Out [Free Verse]

snow falls
 all night long,
 silently piling.

i awaken
 to a place
unrecognizable
 as the one
in which i took to slumber:

the world's detail erased...
 temporarily.

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?

Daily writing prompt
Are you more of a night or morning person?

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

Daily writing prompt
Do lazy days make you feel rested or unproductive?

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.