night-time

of a sweltering summer

in a single bed that is not mine

awake

and thinking

taking my time

to avoid familiar things

and

pretending

that the lull in

consciousness

means only that my thoughts are silent

like a perceptive child with unanswered cries

and not that I have no thoughts

left at all

knowing that the minutes

                hours

                sunsets

                and

weekends

do not stand still as I do

they run

I tried to chase them

and fell

but time waits for me

on sleepless nights like tonight when

my veins rise from my skin with heat

and the window flutters with noise

  not air

and the stranger’s words I read on second-hand paper

under a too-bright bedside lamp

cannot drown the loneliness of an artificial light in darkness

even as a moth recoils on the fake star

so I let the bulb turn cold and leave the book unfinished and

close my eyes for the seventeenth time and

realise that I am neither the

hero nor villain nor lover

I am simply someone that cannot sleep

but content to be so

because the morning

does not  exist

to those who have no

reason to see it and the

tick

                tick

                                tick

is nothing but a mocking reminder that

time is not                           avoiding

or skipping

it is

static

like my frizzy hair on strange

poly-cotton blend pillows

where I cannot dream away

the ache of silent thoughts

as a moth clings to a dying light

in a stuffy foreign room

and I listen to the sad     silent     song

of my life ticking by

because time does not know how to

stop