Sleep Crash Chainsaw Legs

OWWW here it comes . . .
Restless Legs jerk as bad poetry
My flesh hums and crawls
As soon as I lay down
As soon as I lay down!
Restless Legssa misnomer
Cuz it moves everywhere
Like a bad Johnny Cash song
Ragged with non-stop hurtin’
As train whistles blow holes out my skin
Covering me as I slide naked beneath angels.

Spider fish swim up my insides.
Vibrating tendrils of smoke
Wrap around my blood
Squeezing tightening up tight
Reminds me of
School back in Second Grade
When all excited we kids spoke in whispers
Only to get taped silent by our Teacher
Yes, her with her grim grin and perfectly bloated hair
Who glared as she marched at our faces with a roll of tape
Wide yellow white masking tape
So as my legs twitch I remember
Masking tape tugging across chapped lips
Back when Missus Wells did it
Day after day week after week
While the principle laughed
With his red tie knotted tight
Against his wide collar white
Till enough parents banded up to shout “Stop! Hey!”
Damn that Teacher.
Good thing there wasn’t any duct tape back in 1968.
And Americans wonder what rilly led to Abu Ghraib.

Please please please let me sleep
Let me sleep
I’ll give ‘em to you
My legs, yes, my legs
They’re yours, all yours!
Stihl chainsaw oil & lubed
Each fanged link of metal
Sharp to rip out all flesh
Slice to the bone
Grip-ripped through the bone
Nothing stops ‘em, tho.
Spiders
Worms
Snakes
Beetles
Ants
I feel ‘em
Wiggling
Crawling
Even bouncing on tightrope wires sawin’ violins
Up inside my legs…

I don’t sleep. Much. Miss it, tho. Up all night sometimes. Only time I can get stuff done. Then I wake from my desk. Meditate. Go to the Gym. Sweat. Dripping wet. Soaked. But at least I don’t roar and grunt and slam dumbbells the size of Texas slapdown in front of spidercrack mirrors. Still no sleep. How’s my broken down body’s gonna heal? Aye ya…!

Sleep.

Got too much to do. When I lay down the tremors start. In my lower legs. My posterior lower legs and ankle region, to be exact. Both of them at once. Bilaterally. The vibrations began to flutter and dance and jerk in my flexor halluces longus, my flexor digitorom longus, in the tibialis posterior, and move around laterally to the peroneus brevis and longus. Then the creepy crawlies surface into my soleus and gastrocnemius muscles. The vibrations move around to the Tibialis anterior and other muscles, travel up the hamstrings. Damn.

I feel my glutes jerk next and my piriformis ripple, too.
Lats flutter
Trains of ants spasm up my spine
Ain’t no kundalini this time
Twitch beetles flutter in my triceps
My suboccipitals and sternocleidomastoid
Jerk my skull into an almost-Tourette’s
My pelvis jerks
Shoulders dance
My tongue refuses to heed
But I don’t cuss
Maybe it is Tourette’s
But as I’m already duct taped up with so many labels
I don’t wanna know

Deep down inside my legs I feel my muscles drum against my bones
Wild, spasm, taunt-fiber vibrations
I timed them a few times
I count over one hundred vibrations per minute
A thousand in less than ten
And it’s all night long…. sometimes.
Wears me out.

Too much exercise makes it worse
Too little makes it worse
Too much sitting or not enough
I used to climb mountains
And backpack for months at a time
And dance for hours holding my woman
Up in the air as she shouts and laughs
As we rain sweat upon wood, earth, and stone

Angel spreads his enormous wings
Then with stern visage
Wraps them gently around Grim Reaper
Who cries oily tears into white feathers
Outside the entrance to a merchant’s cave

Together with love we tack across the Straight Path
No arrow am I
For I dance all crooked with joy
As I climb beyond my rabbit hole
Upon ladders twisting to the stars
Atop between the legs of Giants
Great Gates swing open in mute invitation

I see everything I see
And more than most would even dare believe
With a nod of incineration
I let go of all belief
And surrender to submit
Into Divine jubilation

Ten thousand Gods
Twenty thousand Goddesses
And One Beyond All and Everything
The One Beyond Gender
The One Beyond the Sum of Many
The Namefree One for whom any name is limitation

I awake and launch upright
And by Dawn
In Mirror bright
I see myself
As clear as Light
With legs filled with snakes and worms and buzzing flies
For Ancient Gods who died inside
I wonder
If so blessed
How do I make
Those mountains yawn?

 

William Dudley Bass
19 November 2011
Seattle, Washington

 

Copyright © 2011, 2016 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship of and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.

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