Sleepshead Bed

They say that in a lover’s bed, 

lies a tiny, little death. 

You think

It is not an endless pit to dread, 

Your lover’s bed 

Is a soft and warm

breeding ground. 

Sleep’s hard to come by in a

lover’s bed:

but not this little everyday death:

You’ll just keep their bedbugs fed. 

Such are the quiet labors of love,

Sometimes we bleed to save them blood, 

sink our backs into broken coils,

wonder if we’ll leave a mark behind. 

They’re sharing their blankets, 

Squeezing me in; 

Surely their bed isn’t just a 

plush, lidless, coffin. 

Don’t invite fear to your lover’s bed,

She’ll whisper in their weary ear: and

Lovers never hesitate to forget. 

Like the tip-of-tongue joy of meals, 

Our fingers tell us how we really feel,

Until our wretched lovers’ broken beds, 

Prevent it from getting to our heads. 

They are morbid lands, the downy, almost pyres

where our lovers nightly retire.

Dangerous places where we willfully

lie whilst sharing our bread;

So what of our own, carefully made bed?

Our familiar sheets will not tickle, 

But we know that even self-lovers are fickle—

So we make a safer bet, that

four hands will more readily suggest

companionship than two

And so we dream, 

As lovers in beds often do

Happily loved until they fall asleep:

A stupor of forgetting 

That love is a gift of giving.

And just like that, in one fell sweep

We’re lying at our lover’s bed’s wobbly feet, 

Prepared to mend the breached orifice

Face the curse which persists: reality must suffice                                                                                               In our tiny, little afterlife.