Jim Daniels: Waking Nightmare, 2019

The gentle sea of her voice floated
into my ear turned up to the world
 
from the bare mattress we’d stripped
long ago and had taken to sleeping on 
 
in these times that required frank and private
exposure. In an ideal world, buskers might be 
 
outside smashing their guitars and gathering 
machine guns to stow in their cases. Or maybe
 
just better words that pierced the smug armor
of—what do they call them?—lies? But amid 
 
the exhaustion of tepid revolution, 
we could only lie there and repeat love
 
with the fatalistic tenacity of the doomed. 
America, 2019. Not so long ago. Today,
 
actually. We had blue sleeping bags we sometimes 
crawled into, but their cocooning properties 
 
had eroded. We had no butterfly illusions.
Why couldn’t we take to the streets
 
like on the news from foreign lands
with wider streets than ours
 
and outrage with staying power
built on bloody old stones thrown
 
against privilege? Wilting in the face 
of true evil, unprepared for the torn-up rulebook, 
 
the pissed-on rulebook, we pouted on the sidelines 
while clever ones made soporific jokes 
 
to overzealous hoots and frantic applause. 
I felt her skin against my back and the comfort 
 
of an open wound. I reached back to pull her 
closer to squeeze out the panic. My other ear 
 
tunneled down through the mattress
to the center of the earth
 
but I could still hear her: 
you must get up, she said.

Copyright 2019 James Daniels

Jim Daniels’ many books include The Middle Ages (Red Mountain Press, 2018). A native of Detroit, Daniels is the Thomas Stockham University Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.