sleeeeeepppppiiinnnnnggggggg, but made of gel, the word sleep35 itself alone inside me shaking with a terror and slow-erupting, my need, my murderer, my maze,36 and here I am again in here again drifting off into a state I’ve shaped so many times, very much equal to wide awake but underwater or with different colors in my teeth,37 where in the wash of blood my brain will be there then suddenly thinking of the suicided singer38 of a band I loved as an obese teen39 and how that guy then was four years younger than I am now inside my current mind today right now as I am thinking, if getting older — and how inside his body then when I was sixteen and he was twenty-seven he was so famous, and how his name and shape have mutated even still since then,40 since the long passed afternoons playing his music in my bedroom41 or in friends’ houses, different lights, days when we would sit inside for hours against older machines42 or in games barfed cleanly from our heads as mental mechanisms that would never be played again, crammed in among all the other music, days of afternoons that seemed to last six times as long as afternoons do now, in someone’s backyard where we would cut open Wiffle ball bats and fill them full of Super Bounce balls,43 covering the bats themselves in electrical tape to make them heavy so we could beat the balls far into the sky, and in our heads still there, the music, those words still there, the recording of the voice, the looming image of the poster of that to-be-dead man in my bedroom those years that would watch me sleeping flattened 2-D on the wall, surrounded in replication with all the other cut-out images of people I could hold inside my head sometimes and would never meet though one could want to, one could imagine in the skull,44 and all the other days inside that white room passing, the days watched by the eyes, the people who came into the room and were beside me, nearing, the day in that room a friend I hardly knew watched me in the mirror brushing my teeth45 and the gumblood was running in my mouth as I made pressure and she asked me if it was always like that when I brushed my teeth and I said often, yes, that the blood would pour a lot, yeah, some days, from my soft system and would pool inside my mouth, the taste of the blood there in my teeth and giving color, and her posture and her eyes seeing me see, and that’s all I remember of that day then as one might say it and why would that ever be anything to me, why in all the hours of then would these ones be the words or actions I held in me over all,46 my brain now spinning so hard in my head I don’t even feel it, and am nowhere here now closer to being gone, if anything I am more alive inside this second than any other I have walked through in this day, and still it does not stop, and still the thinking chain runs like a wire from the door unto the doors, how in the same year as the blood poured and the girl saw I acted at school in a play,47 and now as the instant of the thought around the play hits I cannot stop thinking of the play, and the way the warm light came down from the ceiling on the curtains and white tile, how it felt to stand near the stage’s edge lip and look into a shade of forms I could not fully see, surrounded, eyes veiled and watching behind the bright, how that year backstage the girls would take their tops off and walk around in bras inside small rooms while changing clothes, false hair and costumes and thick makeup, and how I never kissed any of those girls then, felt no sound inside their mouth, though maybe I could have if I’d tried, being a shy one, afraid for so long to bring my head near to another head and breathe, and how many girls I could have kissed or touched those years and did not,48 and what I would be like if I had, what kind of life, and where those girls are now and if they have learned to love someone and if they are happy with what has ever happened, and if they ever think of me too, how pathetic, and what of all those others from then somewhere, nowhere, sound, maybe those people I had known once and now have found again inside my head are also icons inside the machine, maybe somewhere they are there, and should I get up and try to look while I remember and here I am again fully awake, and here I am again at once inside my body and my eyes are open and I’m red, why am I thinking about this, of all things, at this hour, please Blake, please shut the motherfucking shit of yourself up,49 you time-wasting sack of dogshit, you empty ape of god’s dick, time is screaming, life is over, unending night is coming on so hard and in no sound, how am I ever more awake now and more manic than I had been at any point in the whole long disappearing day,50 look at the clock dickface it’s almost three now, which means in order to feel rested I will sleep until at least ten, which means I won’t be up, showered, and at my desk until at least ten forty give or take some, that’s assuming pleasant traffic and nothing else new in your way, ten fucking forty, dude, that’s almost lunchtime, by then so many already have gotten so much done, getting started by then it would be as if the day had already begun before me and gone on and how quickly the day again would have to end, by then it might as well be time for dinner, might as well be midnight, might as well be time again for bed the way these days go, in such transmission and blinking unless they feel fucked and then they seem to be so long,51 and all of this about the time for this beginning with this much rest under my belt by then is all assuming that I start counting sleep time from this exact minute, this seeing the time it measured in this blinking, which is changing again right now again,52 and so really I’m even further behind than I was just then in passing unless somehow right now I can magically nod out, as if somehow the whole unending trend of my sleep patterns in my life might magically be altered in reverse, and so, realistically, since I’m keeping tally, which why the fuck am I doing that, I have to at least assume it will take another thirty minutes rolling, heaving, waiting, before I conk out somehow, that’s if I get started falling asleep immediately, right now,53 and so I must end this thought now, and hear no more thoughts, and be this time truly silent, of the blank, though in the mind inside my mind54 I know no matter what or how simple from here forward there’s no way to not already be behind tomorrow based on the way I’ve spent my time today, specifically the way I spent my time here lying in a bed where anybody else would already be sleeping, everybody, it seems everybody else in every room surrounding me for miles is nowhere, dreaming, in a whorl, the whole world in fact seems asleep and pleased in silence besides me here, except I guess in countries where most people are awake,55 though at least those other awake people are probably being productive, at least moving, and not just lying here caught in a curl of waking nothing, aching brain, and anyway I have not been to most any of those countries, or seen much of those people, and all those other people in their lives, or what they want inside their lives tomorrow, who they were once, what they’re eating, loving, having, everything they’ve ever done to someone else or done at all wrong, and I really have to stop thinking about this shit now or I’m really going to crush it, I have to stop thinking about thinking about this shit56 of life of absolutely everything but nothing and just really just dissolve myself, go on, and though I know I know there’s clearly no way to do it but just to do it like I’ve done on calmer, cleaner nights in certain ways and so on, and so okay, for real this time, let’s have this, let’s get this done, let’s go…