this side of the mattress is not the sleeping surface

I can feel the very bones

holding me together,

 

the skeletal gel,

congealed soul-juice.

 

Or

The cantankerous, sickly curvature

Of a face with

eyes that see too much,

like a shibboleth

of the 21st Century

Dream

 

The yellowing, white sheets are

made up

wounds and burns, decomposing, disregarded

in rising smoke.

 

Its plumes of retreat

and remand.