After months of festival preparation, hosting a house concert, the South Florida Folk Festival weekend, out-of-town company, back-to-back jaunts to the Luna Star Cafe (in addition to my regular life of a full-time job, running a concert series and various UU church commitments), I was finally able to get a good night's sleep - I got in the bed last night at 8 p.m. and woke up at 8 a.m. (a full twelve hours!).
My normal sleep cycle is 4 - 6 hours... and I feel so rested that it's actually disorienting - my weekend is laidback such that I'll go to a movie with my husband this evening (a date night long overdue), work on the BFC newsletter (as well as my laundry and housekeeping) Saturday and make it to Brian and Ellen's festival decompression party Sunday.
SONG: Sleep by Melissa Etheridge
BOOK: I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon by Crystal Zevon
POEM: City That Does Not Sleep by Federico García Lorca (translated by Robert Bly)
In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the
street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the
stars.
Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
In a graveyard far off there is a corpse
who has moaned for three years
because of a dry countryside on his knee;
and that boy they buried this morning cried so much
it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.
Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead
dahlias.
But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;
flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths
in a thicket of new veins,
and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever
and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.
One day
the horses will live in the saloons
and the enraged ants
will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the
eyes of cows.
Another day
we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead
and still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent boats
we will watch our ring flash and roses spring from our tongue.
Careful! Be careful! Be careful!
The men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm,
and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention
of the bridge,
or that dead man who possesses now only his head and a shoe,
we must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes
are waiting,
where the bear's teeth are waiting,
where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,
and the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder.
Nobody is sleeping in the sky. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is sleeping.
If someone does close his eyes,
a whip, boys, a whip!
Let there be a landscape of open eyes
and bitter wounds on fire.
No one is sleeping in this world. No one, no one.
I have said it before.
No one is sleeping.
But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the
night,
open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight
the lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters.
QUOTE: "Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
