Sleep During Thunderstorms

The quality of sleep during thunderstorms
((not wholly un-)like that which is to be had
in hammocks on late Spring days
but instead, of course, with the obligatory
wind and rain howling and pounding away
at the house (if not the very foundations
of the earth itself)) always seems
to free the sleeper to sink
deeper and deeper down
to those primal subterranean layers
of semi-consciousness where sleep
is more like a ghostly oceanic underworld
and dreams are luminescent fish
skulking about among the weeds
and abandoned machines and whatever
other random little trinkets and forgotten things
that filter their way down there from the surface world,
down and down through the hundreds
and thousands of pounds per cubic inch.
And, sometimes, you suddenly come awake
down there inside the belly of a dream,
just lilting along on whatever
under-current that comes sliding by.
And, though you’ve become slightly
more self-aware (of a few of your
other selves) down there in the briny,
dreamy deep-down,
you do not
Drown.

Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is Fence Post Blues (River Dog Press, 2023). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.