I don’t like how the second you don’t die

you’re a survivor—there should be some between

period where you don’t have to be that quite

yet, like how when wild garlic gets torn out

by the roots, the life within it

doesn’t beam straight into some other shoot,

there’s a minute or river of minutes—everyone needs

to slow down, debrief, no new

sobriquet at this time, please—the only speed

I want in my life is to sleep and then wake

with a start, the way they do

in representations of dreaming on film, not wake

as I do now, lightly from the nightmare,

lip raw and a haze of being unsure

if it all was real, which means it was.