Collective Sleep Dysfunction

Nights fail you and mornings are hard.

Are you on the side of sleep or no sleep?

Scared/not scared

of the dark that waits behind your eyes,

the masked parade of thoughts,

front row tickets to the carnival of dread.

You lie down in bed and it’s just not working,

or maybe you drift off okay until

you half dream yourself falling down stairs

and stagger awake,

and then you can’t sleep all over again.

"We slept in the night,

in the morning we got up

and made something of ourselves."

Here we all are on Facebook, on Twitter,

the midnight choir of the narrowly awake:

Why can't I sleep when I'm so darn exhausted?

Why do I stay up too late even though I know

I will be tired tomorrow?

Why are we still awake?
If you don't sleep all night, is it really the next day?

Why don't I want to get out of bed?

"We slept through the afternoon,

as night fell, we dreamed ourselves awake."

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Questions in the poem dream-harvested from the fabulous likes of:
1. Melanie Sanders
2. Sabdha Pink Charlton
3. Nicole Hayes
4. Jo Case
5. Penelope Davie