In the Third Sleep

Jacob McArthur Mooney

(after Kay Sage)

You thought that I had asked to die,

but what I asked was to be released

from the future. Its trudge and aphorisms.

 

You asked: how will we live after civilization? 

I admitted: civilization was all that I was here for. 

Where else are we? Featureless landscapes 

like a storyboard for dreams. The interior life 

that we wanted is astride us. Come closer.

Let me inhale what you didn’t need to keep.

 

Initial sleep, life before life, then an interrupted 

sleep called Nights, and then the third: 

that one long feeling, like

being cold-launched through time, 

a cartoon from a cannon. Wind in my face, 

all that spotless gravity, 

so handsome and stupid and free.

In the Third Sleep

Tolu Oloruntoba

(after Kay Sage)

 

association shuffles its sand nodes

even farther afield.

 

There’s a mirage on the horizon, 

or a rumour of smoke 

 

from a lenticular dune perimeter 

concentrating the oblique sun.

 

***

 

Exposition’s hand can feel heavy 

on the chest in slumber, 

 

heavy as bomb-carrier-wide boardwalks 

in sharp inclension to nowhere,

 

as you breach the surface

of a face-wet dream

 

to a premonition, a theory of involution 

in which: if there can be no masts 

 

on the non-ship, there must be sundials of

sailcloth reading 3:17 post meridiem,

 

or Dacron-ear prophecies breaking containment, 

unfurling on the croft above the seed vault.

 

 

***

 

The Lost Ship of the Desert is a legend 

of the ship that is where it should not.

 

Juan de Iturbe’s galleon, or the Bom Jesus,

or Clive Cussler’s Texas. Flying Dutchmen, 

 

and spelunking zeppelins. Carrying gold, 

or else death. Our landed whales wear

 

Bauhaus barnacles, and fiberop bling. 

You are wanting, found

 

by meteoric satellites, terrible like

the thousand eyes of chitons, arrivant.

In the Third Sleep

Gary Barwin

(after Kay Sage)

I was a handkerchief in my first sleep. The wind a directionless nose. Snotty anxiety? It is so quiet here.

 

In my second sleep, I was a broken sail, origami houses receding into the plaintive distance, battleship grey. 

 

I do not remember if I had a face or a body. I was cut by shadows. The earth is shards, my bones shrouded in unexpected hope. 

 

The third sleep is all existential horizon. No echoes. No death. 

 

Smooth rope replaces love in a cloudless world.

In the Third Sleep

Conor Mc Donnell

(after Kay Sage)

 

I see your first sleep has no shadow:

Tiny-house horizon-bent, isolant from runway-vein

 

 

                                                  Your second sleep sits silent. Origami-

   beasts merge-emerge on aircraft-carrier deck

 

 

                                      In the third sleep, vanished leviathan.

                        Bindings slipped and cast away for swan-dive 

into desert. Come Sunrise, sea-monster swims to next horizon

in the third sleep

 

 

 

In the Third Sleep

Susan Glickman

(after Kay Sage)

If our dreams could weave their silk across the night

the synaptic biome spinning tendrils

from our soft bodies

 

If our dreams could swim or fly or sail

from the skull’s rocky grotto

and its geometry of violence

 

If our dreams could span this windless expanse

to arrive at that other dimension 

where tenderness awaits

In the Third Sleep

James Lindsay

(after Kay Sage)

1.

Cloaked prong’s missile prediction
Obtuse in absence and also access
Two-pronged with gowning drapery
Puddling in bunches on a causeway
Built by our ex-princess and analyst
Populating the barens with structures
Three of them at attention curvilinear
Three failed poems heatedly crumpled
Cast aside because no one needs you
When we have a receding livid horizon
Suggesting stillness in svelte shadows
Inching towards the throwaway poems
Assemblies whose antennas try to talk
To other antennas scattered on a track
Meandering its way about like a noose
Too loose to choke life out of anything


2.

Cloaked like a gawky cage for a macaw
We need to just be quiet and go to sleep
Dreaming bird dreams of two knife sizes
Concealed in linen serviettes we used to
Wipe the blades clean of our fingerprints
Over the cracked flats splintering into ice
Clinking cheers under a launch pad bridge
Abandoned under late afternoon’s perfect
Patient light that is fine to wait a bit longer
Because it has already been waiting a long
While as everyone evaporated in a cloudless
Countdown broadcast across all path spires
An ignition sequence of a young god’s empire
Receding with the ramp or dock and the flats
We all eagerly walk away from before a grand
Unveiling to the invisible suns here to burn us