Awake - Asleep ??

Still trying to gain an understanding of the mind's working in that altered state while trying to stay awake. It happens all too often lately.

It’s not like the place of comfort upon awakening from a night's sleep, where the moments linger in bliss and it doesn’t matter if you succumb to slumber a few more minutes or seconds or thirds. For past experience prepares the body, the mind for a degree of alertness. Whether the transition is drawn by the tail of a snail or the start of a jackrabbit jumping the restless leg anxious and running, there is always peace knowing the place you came from. There you can return should the day turn out wrong.

This is different--a reversal of awareness. Though as unreal as the process of gaining consciousness, it is not a place of peace. More the torture of returning to a hell thought long gone and never even then deserved. Still it would be so good to just give in to the blackness, like the sweet death of afflicted pestilence. No. There is the bounce back and forth – light to darkness, from life to death. And an expanse in between where the inner and outer senses mingle...
an attempt to grasp my psyche’s dynamic
in that space between conscious thought
and passive reception of impression’s whisper
fleeting.
I see an amorphous image—
formless, yet spherical,
a cloud of silver,
a tree of tissue teased by breeze
and seasons color.

Symbols, words, thoughts in a storm, swirling
I try. I try and fail. I try again. I try to catch with my mind
like the mouse clicking to capture or escape in a game of video pursuit
variable, flowing, fleeing
the leaves of a tree
in a fire storm
life or death
awake
asleep
no answer...

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