The One Who Torments Never Sleeps

Suborned between two loves
the one who lies half-sleeping
murmuring sweet sibilant sounds
as she dreams; and, in another
curiously contiguous but separate
space, the one who torments me
without reason because she can.

There are days when the roles
interchange – a seamless passing
of mentorship when it seems the
silent speaks and the animate slips
into a two dimensional frame; on
the one hand nothing changed, on
the other estrangement still lingers.

I have flexed my fingers again and
again, explored the rhetoric, digressed,
returned to the theme; the one who
torments never sleeps, I know that
now for fact, and the one who sleeps
dreams vigorous dreams where I am
bound to be left wandering...
© 22 March 2007, I.D. Carswell