the clacking of his thoughts sound like

the anxious machinery of a typewriter,

ribbon unspooling into ink-laden pages

hammered by shakespeare’s thousand

sweatshop monkeys

he dreams he just woke up

to find his mouth open and full of flies:

their bodies are fat and rich with blood,

and they beat against his tongue again

and again

no, he cannot lift his violently heavy head;

he thinks he heard the snapping of strings

above him and he is afraid to move his

unmoored limbs, to feel the entire weight

of his body beneath him;

if he opens his eyes

would he be astonished?

to see sleeping is like falling,

and dreaming,

a kind of resurrection.