From a Pillow In Harlem
Restless Horizontal
He lay his head on the pillow, eyes closing to the outlines of the room created by the streetlight through the curtains.
And so his ears took over the vigilance. As his body relaxed on the bed he pulled a cool smooth sheet over himself.
They had made love. She was half way to dreams already. Even during a war people need sleep, need touch.
Through the window from outside that familiar hum — something he’d never taken the time to identify, something just always there filling the night air. He has surmised a generator. He has imagined a hovering flying saucer.
But tonight, as happens so often these days, his thoughts bypass that industrial soundtrack and his mind is swept up by the waves, the convulsions—the horrible sickness that the city is undergoing—out there.
He often has a brief surge of restlessness after sex, an urge for flighty talk, but he doesn’t want to wake her, and so the jumpiness takes a grip of him and pulls him out the window, drone flying over Manhattan—some attempt to grasp it all from overhead—to somehow hold it close before he can consider falling asleep. Desperate.
Desperate as parts of entire days have felt. Desperate out of fear, desperate for hope.
He has been out for brief walks and has seen first hand the…
