Beauty Sleep

Trapped in sleep, we must attend to dream,
always running late for a boat or train
with heaps of clothes and keepsakes left to pack
– small print in an oath unwittingly sworn,
codes no longer accepted by your phone,
lost in a loop, deleted in a crash.
Impossible to find those blank spaces back
searching for their site on an open page.
Better in the hole of night to count then
recite bounding flocks of syllables
than exasperatedly to rehearse
the apneic angst of angels jogging
in place, gasping for flights scheduled
at the wrong time in the wrong town.

***
Recurrent dreams are the beauty and the bane of sleep. I have tagged this mute sonnet “noumena” since it belongs to a series of poems about matters in the mind which are usually beyond words — though one could argue that is what all poetry is about.