Night Crawler

When you don’t sleep for a couple days your mind
creeps away,
slips off like a startling beaver scurrying under the sticks,
goes to bed without you,
shrinks into the backgrounds of your head,
closes,
like the pupil reacting to light,
like a camera focusing, shutting down
like a crook
winking.
Like the center of a circular ripple caused by a throaty rock dunking into a pond,
the perfect center that implodes and then spits one beam of water directly up
in the opposite direction
of the falling stone,
your anchor mind sinks
in to the vast ocean of your head.

Suddenly your senses reappear as sturdy, good and whole.
Like a fish you can only survive with your senses submerged.
A tiny carpenter redoes all your wiring,
brand new again and fit to size,
no cat screech door hinge,
not one drill with dying batteries in the house.
Acute senses why have I not skipped heaven’s daily death more often?

I can see a face behind a surrogate fog face on the trolley
peering through its own finger painted eye holes.
I can see it now from the footsteps of the library.
Noises sound different, more accurate, organic.
My teeth Severing the squeaky clean Pentium processed chicken
Sounds like sneakers on a basketball court.
March madness.

A girl I don’t know routinely jerks her head like a dog’s cute misunderstanding of a note
And then she twists like an owl.
The cracking of her neck sounds like squeezing a soda bottle with the cap off and the wrapper on.
Doesn’t she know there’s only a finite number of rearrangements
the neck can make before you have to adjust something near it?
Doesn’t she know the neck becomes like a paper clip.
If she continues this grotesque habit into her adult years
she will become a school yard poll with a tether ball head.

The clicking of the mouse
Sounds like clipping nails.