Things happen when
you force sleep on a lit room.

Day going while the awake
under the light.

The rustling in the walls
and from upstairs where
we always joke
they’re throwing the dog
down a bowling lane,
when it crashes, skids on claws,
they yell at it.

Do the claws know the difference?
Do the little ones in the walls
share my thinking?

The day is different later.

Someone revs a motorcycle
from the other side of a park fence.
They’re playing softball
and the light is fast. It’s so fast
that there is no light.
Unyellow
unlike the yellow light
that catalyzes midday dreams.

Do the little ones feel its sag on them
when they come rustling out the walls?

Is the yellow light for them
when they die in the traps we’ve set?

That’s probably what it was, really.
She probably died slow, caught on the nose
flail around, then that ends, and only little twitch
and slow choke. The image went out
of the little corpse
and into me
and then I went to sleep.
Things I’ll never know about happened-
a cockroach that changed size
moves across the wall.
I touch it with my leg from the couch, fifteen feet away.
If it grows, then so do I
(I know the dream rules)
Then I told someone about it
and have been waking up ever since.