Love Poem: Weekday Alarm
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Written by: Gerald Dillenbeck

Weekday Alarm

I am anxious
as my 5:30 beeping alarm
grows defiantly louder,
reminding me of surreal difference
between asleep, longing for better days awake,
and,
now awake,
longing for more sleep
struggling toward alarming predawn buttons
to release from this first crisis
for depressing life's day-rousing alarms.

I wish for a more therapeutic,
more leisurely,
more retiring way to awake,
if I truly must.

Nearby,
my son who cannot speak
or walk,
but hears just fine,
sleeps on.
Eyes closed.
Dimple mischievously appearing in full moon's light.

What could be his difference
between light unconsciousness of competing spoken day
and dark consciousness of cooperating listening night?

And is this so very different
from vast humane majorities of nations,
who speak too much by day to listen
and listen too briefly at night
to speak of dreams we might share
arising once again together
toward depressing buttons of despair
for this another alarming Earth Day.

This Earth day
with too many speaking half asleep
to future invitations;
Earth nights
listening back to this internal nap half awakened
by past convocations
of memory as light
forgetfulness through therapeutic dark night.

My muted son,
though hardly silent,
as he can be a loud red-charging bull
yet in a peaceful playful warrior way
to those who believe we know
his inside sleep
showing through his outside wake
to share Earth's daytime communion.

He and I
are equally invisible
indivisible
undiscriminated by night
and, I suppose,
both using light
to brighten differences
between inside me
and outside not yet,
not still
double-bound somehow
like outside views
impossible without inside longings
to remember our shared inside-outside intentions.

Wishes and fears,
hopes and angers,
loves and hates unraveling by predative day
arisen from our warm dry beds
of praying affluence.

Longings and belongings,
seductions and reductions,
inductions and deductions,
terrible investments and terrific divestments
calculated reweavings by dualdark night
within our Earthly rest
from fully individuating difference.

The alarm still echoes
through my half awake ears
as I stumble before dawn's light
toward remembering how to become an enabling parent
taught by disabling children of love.
Recalled to how we might awake to love each other more
before this night's rest reweaving Paradise.

I am anxious
as I depress my alarming button,
a toggle switch icon
transitioning anxieties of sleep
through opportunities of life together
awake.

My son turns over
toward his wall of darkening comfort
as he prepares to dream
our Therapeutic Warrior songs
and dances
once again.
His dimpled prayers rise with me.