Change Is Uncertain on Insomniac Nights

Inside the night’s swaddle,
and as if there is but only these place and time
—money flutters, it betokens it is what makes
people beautiful.

See the photos of the film stars framed
as masterpieces of humanity on the silent wall.
Insomnia waxes, alas,
when we glance through
the clipped photos of the stars from newspapers
when they were not stars.
See, Oprah Winfrey.

What is more serious is
some light to beat this cold so merciless.
Beauty has nothing to do
with the frigid, restless hours.
On these biting winter nights,
smoldered by the charcoal container on fire,
regardless of the pride in its halcyon days,
the cold is hiding in ebbing embers as
summer lurks like a Peeping Tom.

As the bed bugs and badgers,
there is a desperation for change.
Change is revolution.
But revolution is the art of lobbing hand grenades.
The more it paralyzes the people,
the more the art has become revolutionary
And our misery for this art and poverty
have shooed away the artists
from hurling the bombs in our vicinity,
even if we love the sounds of blasts and explosion
even if we are so used to the blasting-blitzy din
that so unexceptional the cacophony has come to be.

Change and revolution are fading into futility
as much as the sleep is losing into insomnia.
Let the gun-toting thugs
and the army
and the wise people
and the nation
be vanished into thin air
—out of the streets,
out of our view,
out of this world.

This is no change
but re-singing our newfangled lullaby:
Uncertain Change; and Change, Uncertain.
But the world is a temporary place
for every confusion and contusion,
—more insomniac and madder than these unholy hours.
Let me buy, not the beauty but the hopes
for some deep slumber to recreate
the once beautiful dreams of freedom.
I don’t have the freedom, though,
to sleep when I want, whilst trying,
separating living and making a living.
Money makes you beautiful,
helps you see
life is beautiful,
the world is beautiful;
let me buy my freedom.

Yet in the spiral contradictions and futility,
let these nights be short of its stretch.
Change is uncertain tomorrow,
let only years and years
of freedom and happiness
march forward with the blazing sun.