What’s Gaelic for Sleep Deprivation? by Jeff Bernstein

The first was deep and downy, wind
and rain working the roof and windows
like a father’s hugs in the noisy
quiet of the northwest Hebrides,

the second darkness rasped by a sound
worse than fingernails on a chalkboard,
seagulls fighting in a dumpster. The two
nights lay back to back, not spooning.

How can such opposites touch,
do magnetic forces draw them together?
How can sleep so dictate
what our waking lives are like?

All those wakeful breaks riddled the day
like errant gunfire in the distance in any
one of many war-torn nations, I felt
like lying down but had to keep moving,

the whiskey didn’t help, didn’t hurt either,
and if the delicious rest had come last
morning it’d have been not half bad.
Instead it was one stormy passage

back to the mainland and hell
I just took the bridge, drove
on the wrong side of the road,
clipped the hedgerows, but avoided

those stone walls like the plague,
every bit of cracked pavement
rattled and jumbled my insides
until Glasgow rush hour.

My heart said act like a Bostonian,
my head, keep left except to pass,
the two became one, so I sped up
though I could barely see the white lines.

A lifelong New Englander, Jeff Bernstein divides his time between Boston and Central Vermont. Poetry is his favorite and earliest art form (he can’t draw a whit or hold a tune). He would most have liked to have been, like Thoreau, “an inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms… [a] surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes.” Recent poems have appeared, or will shortly, in, among others, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Best Indie Lit New England, The Centrifugal Eye, Cooweescoowee, Edison Literary Review, Grasslimb, The Kerf, The Midwest Quarterly, Mulberry Fork Review, Paper Nautilus, Pinyon, Plum Tree Tavern, Reckless Writing Poetry Anthology, Rockhurst Review, Silkworm and Tipton Poetry Journal.  He is the author of two chapbooks; his full-length collection “Nightfall, Full of Light” was published in December 2017 by Turning Point. His writer's blog is at www.hurricanelodge.com.