Unsleep

The more persisting condition, however, — the blueness of months, in which anything from shoe-buttons to hair fillet, from the morning kiss to the struggle in the world's arena, from the half satisfactory day's work to the dreaded night of unsleep, is colored—is not so readily elucidated or relieved; and it certainly leaves the sufferer, not elated, but genrally apprehensive of future attackes.

I hadn't even taken time to wonder what in hell she wanted with me: only the terror after the boy put the note in my hand and I found privacy to open and read it and still (the terror) in the courage, desperation, despair—call it whatever you like and whatever it was and wherever I found it — to cross to the door and open it and think as I always had each time I was near, either to dance with her or merely to challenge and give twenty or thirty pounds to an impugner of her honor: Why, she cant possibly be this small, this little, apparently standing only inches short of my own six feet yet small, little; too small to have displaced enough of my peace to contain this much unsleep, to have disarranged this much of what I had at least thought was peace.

Dreams tend to turn real in flint shadows and squint sunshine at morning when the promising young men appear slack jawed and drunk with unsleep and boredom: the young girls - how often young - are type tip tapping at bright lighted desks escaping, waking, some other kind of whoredom.

And then a scant sleep comes, which is more sleep versus unsleep than true rest, but in which for reasons of proximity to death, I dream, half muse of Clair and our sweet-as-tea-cakes winter's romance, commencing four months after she joined our office and ending three months down the road, when she met the older, dignified Negro lawyer who was perfect for her and made my small excitations excess baggage.

Deeper than self entirely, made transparent, The dreamer enters unsleep, a new zone, And in so doing, climbs !

Rather than sleeping the sleep of a very drunk man, I sleep the unsleep of a wizzed out partygoer after a couple of gees too many in the company of Uncle Charles.

In Spain, whenever I recharged, I had descended into a dark blanket of nothingness. The empty unsleep of Echos.

In my own way I sleep, without slumber or repose, this vegetative life of imagining, and the distant reflection of the silent street lamps, like the quiet foam of a dirty sea, hovers behind my restless eyebrows. I sleep and unsleep.