Foot Dragger

For falling asleep without meaning to, thereby discovering the naked need to do so, there is no remedy but the symptom itself, which takes time, maybe time already committed to something else, some worthier activity, or at least something inflexible, something that can't be sacrificed, won't be considered being sacrificed, until it turns out there is no choice because unconsciousness rolls along the bed sheets like clouds over the bowl of a southwestern canyon, roofing in sleepy campers who ought to be making a fire before it gets dark but whose reptile brains recognize sun worship as the only true religion, who fall asleep holding hands, who smile beatifically at the sky gods, who are carried back to childhoods and especially to imaginary childhoods by the pine bouquets, the evocations of the roadrunner landscapes, the impossible softness or roughness or smoothness or hairiness or paleness or richness of the skin of the other hand, the skin/flesh/bone of the fingers and palms pressing into one two-tone limination of warmth, a second sun, smaller, yes, but also much closer than the one that toasts the bodies drifting on the shifting rocks and forests of desert canyons, coyote graveyards, campgrounds littered with beer cans, charred wood, trampled grass, ridiculous hopes pinned to one vacation, lost schedules rendered moot by the sudden implacable need for napping outside the half assembled tents, by the impulse to love, by other things that can't be understood by the human parts of the brain.

We are human and we are animal and there is no contradiction, and it is that contradiction that makes us.