Morning Sickness Poem

Morning Sickness: A Punk Rock Poem about Sleep & Wakefulness

Okay, and now for something completely different.

Imagine that it’s 1981 and you’re a college kid in his first year at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Boulder, Colorado

You have no idea what you want to do with your life but you know you like to read crazy books so you decide to become an English major and worry about what you’ll do for a job at a later date (a much later date, as it turned out).

At Boulder, Colorado you discover beatnik literature, including such authors as William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski (ok, not a Beat, but great) and you also happen to discover American punk rock at the same time. You don’t know which has the bigger influence on you: punk rock or underground literature.

William S. Burroughs, earlier a(n anti) hero of mine.

So you’re heavily into William S. Burroughs’ cut up experimental literature while at the same time listening to The Flesheaters or The Gun Club or Flipper on vinyl LPs (remember those?!) and you become some weird kind of intelligent punk rock beatnik bookworm. With straight A’s. And a Phi Beta Kappa. (yawn)

You begin financing your extracurricular activities by writing the school papers and essays that your friends and acquaintances have due in their classes…and you start creating your own chapbooks of poetry which are then given to perhaps two people at most.

Poetry is lame. But mine wasn’t. It was punk.

Chris D.'s lyrics to The Flesheaters' songs were much better than 90% of the literature I studied in college.

Years later I ended up abandoning a promising career as an advertising copywriter because it sucked. Not only did advertising copy writing suck, it was stressful and cutthroat to boot. So I did odd jobs for many years until I eventually ended up becoming a Web Developer. Coding is like writing. It all kind of makes sense, at least to me.

But in all those long years of one bad job after another (several of them involved making Cafe Lattes for Yuppies at the various cafes where I worked), I also tried to work on writing…

Here, now, is a lost poem from those college years…or was it from the odd job years? Who knows. The brain cells which might reveal this to me are now gone forever. I just happened to think of this poem yesterday, as it struck me what a long, hard road it’s been from those times back then to being the creator of the world’s original Online Alarm Clock website now (which is really great).

The title of this little piece was/is “Morning Sickness“:

Morning Sickness

This globe is a mattress
on which we walk in sleep
a round rotating death lap,
on which we f*** and eat
but never awaken.

We are hibernating
until spasms nocturne
or a blood-stirring pain
alarm us into day
like war, noise or disease:
they pull the covers back.

If we were injected
with Sunlight Benzedrine
shadows would crawl inside,
Queen-Sized Earth would yawn farts,
the shock would kill our dreams,
most likely we'd get sick.

Yet awake we should be,
enlightened by squalor:
the goddess in curlers
bleeds on sheets this morning,
baptized by the rooster's shouts
when the fetus rouses.

At this point you might be asking yourself, “What the heck’s that doing on this Alarm Clock Blog – has this dude flipped his wig?”.

Well, if you think about it, it’s kind of ironic, isn’t it?

I mean, that I wrote such a poem about wakefulness so many years ago, only to end up working on this cool alarm clock website now?

Well, I think it’s a very cool coincidence and I hope some of you also enjoyed reading “Morning Sickness“.

But, if not: no problem.

It’s my blog. I can do whatever the heck I want with it.