Sleeplessness  

Just for a moment I shut my eyes and

Boston tumbles into its harbor.

The eighties come to visit me in neon

colours and roll me into a cigarette.

Puerto Rico is tired of the Caribbean.

It sinks like a submarine and surfaces

in the middle of the Mediterranean. With dark rum

it invites the surprised ships to anchor.

Waiting for me on deck chairs are

my dear wives and husbands.

We play the man-don’t-get-mad game,

the one who loses sinks his knives.

Just for a moment I shut my eyes and

sibilant consonants unscrew themselves from words,

they rent the five thousand fifth floor of the

Tower of Babel and they lose their harmony.

The sixth wife moves into the Pantheon, taking

with her all the silverware, even the wedding crystal

from Rogaška Slatina for the gods’ domestic staff.

Haiti shakes Guantanamo to the bones.

The Tyrol takes possession of Italy, decrees mandatory

noontime yodelling from every campanile.

Sicily digs a smuggling tunnel to Soho.

The sixth wife returns empty-handed.

Just for a moment I shut my eyes and

the pillow gets down to business with my cranium:

will there be peace, finally?

Jupiter invites the reconnaissance satellites

for an interplanetary conference.

Behind closed doors he threatens the snoopers

with an intergalactic war. They will melt the

Antarctic like ice-creams at the beach,

skyscrapers, light-houses in the middle of the ocean.

The fifth husband makes off with the first wife

to Soho for Sicilian sweet rolls.

A synod of doctors measures my blood pressure,

they tell me I should just relax.

Just for a moment I shut my eyes and

shares fall on stock exchanges.

An alligator in the Florida swamps munches

the foot of a tourist and excretes it

in the shape of a cowboy boot

size thirty-eight.

The neighbours’ splendid cat on the

gable of the roof is kissed by the moon, so that

all my spouses peek from behind the curtain

and emotionally wipe away their tears.

Mr. Atlantic places an oil rig on the palm

of Ms. Adriatic and asks for her hand.

I open my eyes and the sheep I have counted

dash away over the fence, graze on

the salad in my favourite wife’s garden,

who gets angry, I am not to be trusted,

and moves away to the Tower of Babel

with a view of the wrathful languages.

Amsterdam catches the travel fever,

swims away on an excursion to Rotterdam.

En route it looks round the Keukenhof Gardens.

The sheep start on the tulips and daffodils.

The Netherlands make an offer of their

deserted property to Brooklyn. The blue-eyed

husband who owns a yellow taxi

comes back home disappointed.

The hands on the clock stay down in the corner

of half past five. Once again I shut my eyes

and the left eyeball asks the right:

Are you asleep, finally?