Sleep won’t come.

The walls are dark with shadow,
the endless rain washes the wind chimes,
a cacophony of mother nature’s wet
drowning and mankind’s metal
clanging.

One line from “Kathy’s Song” playing in my head,
“my mind distracted and
confused,
distracted and confused, distracted
and confused,”
pattering more wildly than the flooding
rain beyond the window.

The only image I can muster
is of the virtual flight of geese
that squawk above snow capped mountains
which glisten endlessly on a gray sky
in my video game from an hour before.
It is all 10110111001110s.
Coded, false beauty for a world
that was once beautiful but is now false.

I wonder what those geese think,
in between their balance of 0s and 1s.
Are they still beautiful, still graceful?
Does their home lie south,
are they our replacement?

Did real geese fly when Noah watched the water rise?
When he felt the vessel first quake,
wrath of rain undrained beneath him?
Did those geese squawk above him as the pattering fell?
Were we reborn? Or were we all reset?
That great vessel,
a mahogany leviathan that eats its own tale,
resetting with one wet storm all,
10110111001110s from above.

I will count each 1.
Each 0.
I will watch the geese fly
south towards home.
Sleep will come.