I want to slip out of this husk of moonlight, this night of white robes, of Nero frantically unfolding the dark with orange flames, music’s medicine in my head. Klonopin, Lorazapam, Ambien fiddle through my veins their unfinished symphony, darken the day’s bright columns of trees, the falling birds I read about in the newspaper. One thousand dropped, bodies like umlats. My night’s harness, a poet’s madness, perhaps a conqueror’s. Sometimes, I am Lucullus, writing priapic love letters on milky white breasts, leaving unidentifiable smudges on the sheets. Mostly I am Virgil looking for home. Sometimes I hear music. Someone fiddling. Leaping chords. They called Tchaikovsky’s last great symphony, cacophonous. Or was it “a cacophony?” Days later he died of typhoid, of grief. Only Tchaikovsky was a true genius and he was a has been, and therefore, twice the threat. The crow barks loudest when there is nothing to eat, when there is no grain for bread. Peel back the bloody robes of Caesar, the staffs of light that riddled his body, that left him lying on the stone, the same hands of hatred that glistened on the tips of the all the batons that professed their love to Pytor while stabbing him in the back. I hear his music. It’s what makes me wake at night. It’s what makes the ringing in my ears, the violin strings like tendons, the bow over my heart. My legs, trombones that slide back and forth, shaking their sweat, spraying their backs like a wild herd of elephants. I walk from room to room, a door wanting to close, a broom closet filled with spiders, a spineless door to the basement. I see my face in the knobs carnivalized. My mouth is bigger than I thought. If I shut each door what would happen? Like the closing of hands, the wish of a silent prayer. That new door Hawking discovered, that unfathomable nothingness that no light travels through. What handle do I turn to open this black box of dead stars, trajectories of negative matter? Like the neurons in my head, that stroke of flashing light, the stroke of genius, a stroke of luck, a stroke of blood that freezes the right upper quadrant of your brain, the one that keeps you awake. Hamlet wanders around my apartment looking for a comfortable sofa. He lies awake all night dreaming of ways to kill his traitorous mother, his lecherous father, Ophelia wandering the halls looking for a good lay, a good roll, carrying a bouquet of forget-me-nots, tearing each petal as if it were a piece of clothing, until their is nothing left but the roots, the white color of her skin floating at the bottom of a lake. To sleep perchance to dream. Poor Polonious, knifed like a pork chop through the white curtains. Sleep of death. Murder now on Hamlets tender hands. Sweet Hamlet who wouldn’t murder a fly now wanting desperately a good night’s sleep, the tip of the sword not yet poisoned, the dagger not yet pushed all the way in. Like Hamlet, my heart has loved and hated for so long, my brain has become a cistern where toxicologists meet. I wonder if this is what Carl meant? The crashing symbol on the ripping shore, the body’s willingness to give in to the mind when it should not. Is this why I cannot sleep, because I do not understand this in my fervent waking, love’s indifference to the mind’s interference, the body burning at both ends, the way music burns the soul, or melts the Roman sky, the blinking water. That there is no sleep, only a change of the second hand on the clock, the centuries fervent turning. Ophelia at the bottom of the river, not dead, still awake catching the waves, the tiny ripples of time in the thin crust of her eye. The way the moon never sleeps, but simply turns away, fastening itself to another part of the world. O, fuel me, sweet medicinal nectar of benzodiazepines with the bee’s whirlpool, night honey, the mad bible of patience. O, let me bite the Queen’s apple, double the dose. My prescriptions are running out. My bank account is low. I cannot forget what I know. The body remembers. This history of mine, a drop of blood written on linen, a score, an amber bottle of pills, a palette. It has its own language and it never stops talking.