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Sleepless by Julia Deakin Fixing your eyes dead centre on the road you turn the radio down low and pull your thoughts back from the verge of morbid dreams to better times ahead. Even the sleet now softening to snow seems kind - like life relaxing. Yes! You'd get things right this time. Four thirty, getting on for dawn. Best time to use the motorways these days. The roads deserted - not a sign of human life. High on adrenaline - and her - you pull your mind back to the job in hand. Sleet swirling at you now, like those strange dreams you move through saying this is just a dream. Or last night on the phone. Where had the time gone? When you're having fun it flies, like sleet melts, instantly, into the past - the road behind - and you fly too, till something pulls you back - some sudden crisis stops your life dead in its tracks... but then that's life's rich pattern for you. In your worst dreams or nightmares these things happen, but you pull through - when the alarm goes, sometimes at the very moment - weird, that. Bad road and you're tired - talking to yourself. Sleet falling. Falling. Walking. Waking. Sleet across the tracks. Can't be. The tracks! Life flashing past you like a train that's left the road the line the phone call 999 bad dreams get back! Please, help - there might not be much time and - there's a train coming! Not waking, pull your eyes back open. Sick. But must... and pull yourself back to your feet and move through sleet and darkness to the horror of the time that from now on you'll have to call your life. That scene, those screams will be your waking dreams until your wished-for death blocks off the road. Now you pull back your sleeve to inject dreams: a sleet-cold, straight black vein your only road back to another time... another life. © Julia Deakin « Home | Contributor Notes » Please comment on this poem. |
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