Sleepwalking Through a Mirror

A personal study of self-perception and appreciation.

By Michael Stone

It limps, arguing its way forward. Flames lick its feet, ever-tired, ever-renewing in energy. Lying down at night the body stretches, growing and spreading in its spirit, a container for thoughts and feelings, behaviors and maps of neurology sprawled past blood vessels and nerves, muscles and skin. It functions with economy and knows what it needs, how much to take, how much to leave.

In the atmosphere the body inflates. The lungs pump in and out the elements. Watch it expand and contract. It gives everything back. The body manages on, its part and parcel to behave according to its needs.

I’m uncomfortable: my neck aches, the shells of my back splinter, my heart beats faster. I haven’t slept. I see time in front of me, eyes closed, reaching into the dark, the volume cranked in my mind, spinning out. I’m drunk, sober, clinging to my bed, tears pouring from a viaduct of expression. I have never gotten used to this. The speed of thought is too great, I revolt. I swear up and down the street of my psyche. The body is me, I’m trapped in its glory. The sweat dries, sticky legs in hot sheets. I never sleep.

I wake up surprised in a space I forgot, my mind splitting it, death with me all the time, I can’t forget it, my skin shedding, hair falling out, old clothes disbanded. Newness I can’t embrace. I dust my head with a glass of water and flow into an ocean, a ream of paper expanding, opening my atoms. I evaporate and I’m gone. The world tortures me, I was never a part of it, I’m in debt to the whole, I’m long gone. I’m exaggerated as if somewhere else.

I trim my cold toenails, warm heart pulsing. We divulge secrets to each other, I saw you glancing. I always need you.

Need goes underneath me, carries knowledge I don’t remember. It feels, remembers the same, looks into the light and crinkles up, refreshes and rises for redemption. In the closet of time we wear whatever clothes we want. I wear myself out just thinking about it. So I go for a run and the ecstasy of exerting myself wakes me up. Here we are back from the abstract mind, conquering the daily life of someone vaguely familiar, ourself, our hands, crushing and catching. You, I see you in the mirror, you look just like me but a little backwards and I think I love you, I have to love you or else I fall asleep.

Michael Stone is a poet from Kalamazoo, MI but the only way to read his work is to make him food. He works in youth development in Grand Rapids and makes music under the name Desert Golfer.