If I slip away
from the evening news
to sleep in a good bed,
if i turn off the phone so no one can call on me,
if no one calls on me and I sleep easy,
if I sleep easy and then decide
I deserve the easy dreams I am given,
if I live the peaceful life I believe I deserve —
will I deserve it?
Do I deserve peace,
do any of us deserve peace
when every day we awaken
to murder stories
and shake our heads
when the worst thing that happens to us is that
the cat breaks a candle stick
while jumping from the forbidden dresser
to the center of the bed,
purring and demanding
his morning bowl?
Do I deserve a life
that allows me
to decide my day’s progress
in relative certainty,
because the sharp transition
from hell to heaven and back
is not usually ours to fear?
How can we say we deserve this life
when a switch on the radio can give us
reasons to despair the path ahead?
How easily we move
from the current “here” to the next “here,”
able to shut out “there” because it barely registers,
all other worlds collapsing safely elsewhere!
I think of our comfortable carpets
woven in their lands
taken from them by our need and our war;
their bright poppies
feeding our hip or desperate neighbors.
These are the lives we’re dealt
and we embrace them until the small moment
after the cat’s abandoned us to eat and sleep on his own,
no longer in need of us, and we lie awake on the couch,
each of us thinking:
How can I deserve this life
when luck
handed it to me?
Perhaps I am alone in this,
wondering about the sea level
and the seesaw world.
Perhaps the cat’s got it right:
call on others
to get things done
and when things are done,
slip away to sleep alone.
Perhaps I will sleep on it some more,
roll deep into the feather bed
and learn to deserve what I’ve got —
let the cat find his own food
in the corners of the basement,
let him rip off heads and feed
till he’s quiet. Perhaps I should find
someone to sleep with
who will remind me
to turn the radio off
once in a while. Perhaps
my sleeping easily
is just the cost of doing business,
and luck is just a glorified way to say
I’m sticking someone else with the bill…
or perhaps we pay,
a little,
every time
we wake up staring
into the dark.
Dark Matter 