Flowers on His Pillow

Crystal morning reverie shattered
by thought's banal intercession,
he resumes his body to find
his fingers walking the unfamiliar
landscape of a duvet of another's choosing --
weary prospectors lost in the desert
gasping toward a fantasy of water.

As alone in wakefulness as in sleep;
equally uneasy as audience
to the play of morning and as player
in a murder of dreams;
his Grand Guignol
of contingency and regret
wrought rewrought (and overwrought) by day,
staged in perverse infamy by night --

each morning his fate fulfilled:
a series of awakenings in strange beds:
flowers on his pillow
ashes on his tongue.