The Pillow and the Book

About a thousand years ago,

sick for lost love sleepless alone I lay

from red dayfall though black to morning gray

trying to read Ulysses in a borrowed room,

while yesterday's rejections played their act below

the ecstasies of Molly Bloom,

and the intolerable gray page

of print, in timeless nonsense, beat my eyes, to mock

a lonely universe of sheets and clock

where I, king in an empty house and a night

cohabited by solitude and rage,

killed time into daylight,

and then got up, and left the place,

and never set eyes upon that furniture

again of white-night torment. O all poor

adolescents, what unsleeps you must endure, to span

with literature and life that deadly space

between the boy and man.