Errant Right To Sleep

Let me lie beside you in my waking dream,
I’ll try to keep the peace you seem to think
we needed when the battle ended; war for
me was ever gainful whether won or sorely
lost to bitter endings – all tragedies among
the tragedies from whence we learned to
live or die – be cast anew, thrown aside or
born with fire in saddened, sightless eyes.

I do not sleep to dream although I dream
of you – to lie beside your weightless form
in sleep, the sinews gone the flesh a pliant
mesh of moments I had lived alarmed in arms
to weep or die for, and enter in your womb
of regent peace, earn an errant right to sleep.
© 16 December 2007, I. D. Carswell