Seconal

Twenty years, awake to every day; the sun, its shock or sullenness of light, darkness—pools and ditches of air; so tired—twenty pills to sleep. (“Slap her! Make her walk! Talk to her! She has to stay awake! Keep her awake!”) Their worry founders in her year-wide yawns, her calm dilating in a snow of Seconal. Myself as dumb and lost in drifts as she, I wander to my room, stung briefly by the siren as it comes, but yawning then myself that I forget, as she forgot herself, her in my smaller, shorter sleep.

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