May 18—IYKYK

An old poem of mine, appropriate for today:

Elaine Elizabeth Belz
LYRICS FOR THE RUN-OFF HISS

The birds were singing in your letter: figments
of your drunkenness, perhaps; or else the night
had finally succumbed to morning—Morning
seems unreal in this real-life dream.

In your half-lit last rite, even I can see
that rising sun, whose sudden rays burst chaos
through your sprawling penmanship, through shaken words
that faltered, in both form and sense,

but never faltered in their lust for dawn. Now
the night you thought would never end is over.
And the sun that rises, as it always will,
cannot care what fate it brought you

as your hand—intoxicated with the dreams
an endless night could endlessly embellish—
put a period to your sleeplessness.
In the absurd light of new dawn,

these words you penned, but could not live, replace you.
Yes, the sun still shines; and I suppose the birds
kept singing: a mantra for unresolved sleep.
One day we will wake in your dream.

Incidentally, I wrote this (in the late 90s) by imposing an 11-11-11-8 syllable count. Likely, that’s just how the beginning of the poem fell out and I wanted to keep the rhythm or something. The one exception is the line, “put a period to your sleeplessness,” which is one syllable short, on purpose. Somewhere I had read the phrase attributed to Seneca, I believe, about “put[ting] a period to one’s life;” I can’t find that quote now, so I may have misremembered it or it was a bad quote, but it works here, I think.

The poem is based on a passage in Deborah Curtis’ book, Touching from a Distance.

The italicized lines are allusions to or alterations of song lyrics:
–lines 3-4 borrow from both Durutti Column’s Sleep Will Come (“Evening is unreal…”) and New Order’s We All Stand (“…in this real-life fantasy”)
–the final line alters a phrase in Joy Division’s In a Lonely Place, recorded by New Order (“…Someday we will die in your dreams…”)

Note: the “run-off” or “run-out” groove is the part of a vinyl record nearest the label, where the needle, well, runs off, after having played that side of the record. If you leave it going, it just keeps rotating and skipping back into the groove, producing a static noise similar to hissing punctuated by a little thump with each rotation.