Before Sleeping
I'm tired. In ways I can't explain.
So tired that everything else looks
tired too. Like the rural mailboxes
lining the road on US 41 South.
They lean into the curve of road,
colors faded, flags dangling and broken
by their sides. Year by year, they
have been laden with the heaviness
of obligations hard to fill (final notice--
we turn the gas off 8 a.m. Monday)
and known the emptiness of no Christmas
or birthday cards.
****************************************
Too tired to complete anything. Gone all weekend.
Drove lots. Paying now.
4 comments:
you've got a good poem going in tired -- try doing it with just the mailboxes, no narrator's persona at all. just those empty dangling aging lives. beautiful stuff. hope you've gotten some rest by now. jim
Thanks, jim. I think you're right about losing the narrator's persona. It was a lead in that can go.
I was lying down last night trying to go to sleep. I was so very tired. I don't sleep well for the most part, and I had been away all weekend and didn't sleep much at all while I was away.
So, there I was--very, very tired but unable to sleep, and I was thinking about how "things" seem tired as well--like the mailboxes and the little towns I passed on my way home, the cattle grazing in the rain, the willow near a creek overflowing its boundaries, the slanted, weathered tobacco barns that remain standing even after 100 mile per hour winds though they look like if you just pushed them with your hand, they would fall right over
and so, I just jotted this much down but don't know if it will go anywhere.
Still too tired to think about it.
*sigh*
Maybe a cuppa joe will help clear some cobwebs.
Do you like Mary Oliver's work?
I think James has a point. The mailboxes -- strong as image and metaphor -- are the poem. You might try something along these lines, and work the notion of tired into the title.
The rural mailboxes lining the road
on US 41 South lean into the curve
of road, colors faded, flags dangling
and broken by their sides. Year by year,
heavy with obligations hard to fill
(final notice-- we turn the gas off
8 a.m. Monday) they know the emptiness
of no Christmas or birthday cards.
You are on to something here. I like this a great deal. Stay with it.
Hey Sam,
Good to see you here. I agree with james as well about losing the narrator's persona. I just wondered how long I could sustain the mailbox metaphor and keep it as meaningful on the page as it feels to me in my brain, but I think the premise has possibilitites. Already I've had mailboxes in all sorts of "tiring" situations...be it weather or death or foreclosure or things coming a little too soon or a bit too late--that sort of thing.
When the brain fog lifts (if it ever does), I plan to revisit my ramblings. My journal is full of them. Just little snippets here and there.
Thanks, Sam.
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