cOW'S sTOMACH*

I can’t but I wish I could sleep. I wish I could wish myself to sleep, to sleep the sleep of the naturalised and distaff. I crave to sleep, a yearning to aspire to sleep. But instead I sit here smoking Gauloises one after the other, tars, benzenes, lipids and neurotoxins spoiling the tripe of my lungs. What is sleep but the absence of wakefulness, the difference between walking erect and stumbling in a somnambulistic stupor, an opposition to rousing and rekindling? Perhaps I have been asleep all along but didn’t know it, didn’t know the difference between waking and stifle. Now that I do, I suppose being awake isn’t as hideous an avocation as I first thought, asleep as I was, in a stifling daze, lipids and benzenes and neurotoxins eating away at the cow’s stomach of my brain.