Sleep Study

Because I snore at night

and wake

sometimes,

chewing on a tongue of terror,

my doctor prescribed a sleep study.

Tonight, at the hospital,

a nurse binds me to a clinic bed

with sensors and wires and straps,

an electric kind of bondage —

I am tubed and surveilled,

expected to sleep soundly

in this antiseptic ghost of a bedroom,

where someone always listens

and someone always watches.

Two a.m., half-addled, I teeter

on consciousness, stumble-drunk,

one foot in the world and one in slumber.

Stare at the glass eye over my head

and wonder what all this paraphernalia

tells my nurse about me. What

can she read on her charts and monitors?

Can she see the yellow eyes

that have stalked through

my sleep since I was a child?

Can she see the name tags

fettered to my wet dreams?

When I wake, I’ll ask her

if she can draw me a map

through the architecture of sleep

to the fountain where

my poetry spills forth,

to the spring in the rock

and the steaming basin of words

where I drown every night;

every morning, I surface and gasp

for air, wring what drops of poetry

I can out of my beard and onto the page,

and, spent, forget my way back

until sleep seduces me again.

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