Sleep Song
I lay in a field of black flowers, and there were purple veins and green that floated like thin worms about me.
There were soft thick shapes swaying liquidly, moving unseen, and I lay under them gripped by soft thick mists.
Deep under them I lay hidden and they pulled me deeper into the field rolling softly around me.
A sorrow that had pursued me in my soul left me as I vanished, left me and floated above the flowers.
And I saw a white face drifting away like a pale bubble over the top of my black garden.
A white face like a dim sorrow, like a mute pain, drifting far away; the white face of a dead love searching in vain for me, in vain.
The day was a white monster, naked and bellowing; grinning after me with its buildings that were jagged rows of dirty teeth. There was no place to hide from my sorrow.
It lay in the sky that winked at me like a vast and blue and relentless eye. And it lay in the sun that burned like a golden grotesque. It lay in every laugh and in every beauty and in every little bird that lost itself over the water.
I felt the black flowers grow blacker and higher and I moved deeper into the blackness.