Artificial Dreams by Isabelle Shachtman

Been sitting still the whole day

Can’t sleep

Thank you trazowhatervthehellyouare

For the frog and the eyes

And the image of my

Ex-girlfriend in the sun and

What am I saying?

What’ve I done?

I convince myself that swallowing this pill

Is aborting 50 sheep

And see red hoof marks on the ceiling

With my eyes closed

And I smile,

Convincing myself I’m not dreaming

And have a little fun with it

Before I fall asleep

And down and up

And behind my eyes like a god

Overlooking the rain

I embrace this saccharine love of the cold toed puddle

And backroad trips and highway falls

And baby sheep nursing my blood

Until they scream metallic can kicking prayer

In crowns woven of my eyelashes--

Uprooted by their dark velvet mouths

And fluttering black eyes

Swimming away from me,

Amorphous, like snails,

Screaming rah rah rah rah rah

Biting the bad people

Off my hands---

Before I wake up in sheets

smelling like a girl

Who was never in them, but

Was, faintly, in the same laundry cycle as them

And therefore,

Maybe smells a little like my dreams now

Been the whole day

I can’t

Still can’t

Be the girl I saw in the sun

Behind the rain that I see, but cannot smell

Can predict, but cannot stop

helpless holy happiness

Until the streetlights pity me

And I get up a quarter past midnight

To harvest the bones I forgot to dig up,

and the dirt crumbles

And says marry me

And green will turn spring to gold

And I say yes, Persephone must die--

Let's create another miserable tale

And fuck the world

Let us live

Cross eyed and apathetic

daring our mouse food for brains

to find god in the side effects, night terrors---

Our own hand-embroidered psychiatry

Urge! Urge! sleep.