I may have woken up

I may have woken up

I can never be sure.

Is that healthy?

I guess it is

Science needs verification

Multiple sources.

Even looking in the mirror.

Is unhelpful

I never recognise anybody in there.

I need somebody to love

I don’t mean that

The way it sounds

But maybe I do.

But that was before I realised

I was just alone.

It made me feel better

Especially after a night lying awake

Until, half an hour before

The alarm sounded.

I threw it out of the window

Clocked an old dear

On the head.

I just lay in bed

Pretending to be somewhere else

It never works

The clock came back.

She had a good arm.

Maybe it didn’t happen

I can never tell

It might have been a dream

Or perhaps I remember it wrong.

Memory is like that

Something may never happen

But if you tell yourself it did

For long enough

After a while

You come to believe it

And that way your backstory

Grows into a personalised fiction.

Auto-biographies are the same

(It’s why I never read them)

I know that because

Once upon a time,

In another lifetime

When I was mostly awake,

I was a psychologist

And people trusted me enough

To sit in the same room

For an hour at a time.

I even got paid

Today I would pay somebody

To sit in a room with me

For an hour at a time

And not fall asleep.

We wouldn’t need to speak

Words can be overrated

But sitting, connecting

On another level,

That would work.