Jon Nakapalau

the secretion of sleeplessness

I

over time spent in tidal burning
and the embers of the moon falling

until whisper of our love become spectral
needing nothing more than a promise that to

speak was to hide with breath that which was not
meant to be in a kind of destructive ticking that tells

of a yesterday that shifted in tattered wanting and now
it is so clear that you were hidden like a pearl in my heart

II

and pain was so devious in my hope that there was still a
possibility of our days to be like crushed falling stars in

but when gazing across the horizon on a shore that
is inked deep blue just before the storm that is still

in stillness of expected years this was the one
place I could find no safe harbor from but I

still waited even as the gulls laughed at
me in the debris of lost tomorrows.