sleeping

As a child I would confuse the ideas
of being awake and being alive. 'All these
pretty colours happened when I was dead,' I would say,
to a morning full of prettier still,
as if the final end was to be
a tightrope walk through rainbows. Now

when a bullet consciousness
is shot into my duvet dressed body,
a cold voice decommissioned of its embers creeps into me.
'That was what it would feel like to be dead.'
And my body judders together like a shuddering door and hinge;
because I don't remember my dreams any more
and if I do
I don't want to.