for sleep

You were so close to death that you prayed

for heaven to come down:

but you wanted sleep, to be buried

under a thousand grains of sand,

quieted by the falling-away of time.

(Real irony is always clever

but seldom sweet.)

You'd never be the same,

praying that prayer

for sleep, for

endless closed eyelids;

you were really waiting for winter

to end, for the sounds

in the walls to cease.