Four hours of sleep,
five days in a row.

Five minutes to think
between fatigued stupidities,
and still they spill 
out of my mouth
as if carried on 
a swift stream that cuts
through without stopping;

such a splash each one makes.

Three hours of sleep,
ten days in a row, and

I don’t even know 
the current name of the country
I live in.  Trying
to put my finger on how else
it has changed, I drop
another clumsy chunk
off my lips into water
everyone has to drink. 

I’m trying to figure it out
even as I make it worse.

Apologize and then say no,
it’s not that, no,
it’s not that, no,
it’s not that.  

I am not afraid of
offending, only of offending 
by not being clear.  

Two hours of sleep,
ten weeks in a row;
two hours of sleep
ten months, ten years,
for a few decades now;

this place I’ve always called
America, to be honest,
is only comfortable now

for those who get 
all the sleep they are allowed

with no alarms to wake them
and no lumps in the bed 
and no noises to rouse them
into night terrors.

As for me?
One rotten hour a night
hundreds and hundreds
of years in a row;

I can’t tell you 
who I am.

People keep saying
self-care, self-care,

then back to the front,
back to the struggle.

What do you do if
self-care is the site

of the struggle? When
the struggle is about

the medications being
too dear, the therapy being

uncovered. When the struggle 
is about the job being

too scant, the money
no longer elastic enough.

When the struggle is
about your face betraying 

the nations within you.
When you ache hard

to get back to the war
you’ve always known

was yours to fight, but 
other aches pin you

to the couch. When you long
to rise on fire for those you love

but they instead stroke your hair
and pity you with their honest eyes

as fear wells up in your own,
bubbling up from former depths

that silted up long ago, 
that have never been dredged. Self-care,

self-care, then back to the front,
back to the struggle. That’s what

is said.  But self-care, self-care,
your eyes always on you,

is how you got here,
and now

you look up into the honest eyes
of those who pity you and say:

how is the battle that I am
worth fighting? And back to the front

you go, struggling
to answer that question.

Something has occurred to me.
I don’t like that. I thought I was done
with that. I’m 73% of the way
to average life expectancy and it’s
an imposition to be pushed too hard

to revive critical thought and 
discernment. Really want mostly
to slip through the remaining 27%
I’ve likely got left and settle into bed
one last time — oh, a hug would be

good too, and less pain, and less
concern about the hardness of living —
but here I am and here’s this new thought
about what I’m supposed to be doing,
and I don’t like it. In fact I’m terrified

of it. I feel like it’s going to rob me
of at least 75% of the 27% of time
I had left and take up 93% of my energy
and that will leave me less than I need
for hugs and slipping into bed and 

ending up comfortable when I’m done
breathing. Ideas and passions notwithstanding
I thought I was done and now the times
put ideas into my heads that someone 
ought to be making real, but why 

it has to be me I don’t know. I don’t
think it’s a God thing — I gave that up.
And I don’t think it’s a sense of obligation
to people in general — have you met them
in all their wasted splendor and sick clinging

to maintaining life as they know it? Somehow
it seems to have fallen to me and maybe
ten or fifteen million others to act upon
this thought that’s occurred to us, and 95%
of us are likely sitting in bed or at a bar

or at a kitchen table tonight while the family sleeps
and asking themselves why they’re 99% certain
that this new idea about what’s to be done,
this song of mayhem and disruption, needs us
to sing it, and how do we start, and isn’t there someone

or some cohort of someones
who know better than us how to do it
with 86% more efficiency and less injury
to themselves than we would incur, and 
why is it that these ideas always occur

to people like us who can look at what’s being asked
and understand what would be required of us
and understand the ridicule to come and the depth
of violence and pain to come from being
the ones with the ideas and the calling 

to follow through? All we want is to get through
the 57% or 35% or 68% of life expectancy we’ve got left
with as little fuss as possible and here it comes:
all the fuss, all the weight, all the dread and all
the obvious fear. We sit up in bed or at the table

or at the bar and say: we were told there would be
no math and look, there’s math.  There’s math about
calculated risks and divisions and separations and
the number of minutes we could stand to be tortured,
and the arithmetic processes of how to time a revolution

perfectly. I’m a long way from happy about this. I never
wanted this hugless, bloody, spitfire examination
that I will likely fail. I’m not prepared. I didn’t study.
I’m neither smart enough nor strong enough. I’m 
73% of the way to death without it and here it is

presenting a word problem: if a world view
gains power with 400% more hunger
than it showed before — it’s always been hungry
but now it seems fatally famished — and zero
concern for others,

and another world view starves
as the first feeds, how many of us
will it take to choke the first one dead,
and how long do you think it will take us
to get enough hands around its gargantuan throat?

Released from caring
for a moment about
the state of the world

through the act of cleaning
all the kitchen cabinets
and reorganizing pots

and pans and too many
coffee mugs and making
donation piles and nodding

in sadness at the need to 
simply deport some things to
the recycling bin as if they

could be something other
than what they are and have been
for their entire lives and then

collapsing into the couch
coated in sweat and my sugar’s
been stupid high of late and

I should go to the doctor but
the co-pay is beyond my means
and it feels like there’s a nuclear war

under my skin until I shower
with the water turned up high and hot
drowning me almost like a hurricane

but thankful that I left the TV off
and stayed strictly away from the news
and kept the personal separate

from the political