For seven nights you’ve flickered
     into dawn with a burning violin—
     like some pale and incoherent flame,
     shivered and chilled in the grip
     of this reckless tarantella:
     this fever, this venom, honey-
     stung, gold lightning in your veins.

          — Another Possible Version of the Note

1.

Warning hiss of sinusitis—right eye socket’s emergency road flare of pain flickering the morning dark.

All night long, thoughts you didn’t want to think which nonetheless still insisted on being thought about cylindered inside your skull like the chilled spin of marbles slanting down a hardwood floor.

Cold drizzle on snow made a treachery of last night’s streets. Happenstance accidents. Morning’s rupture of snow. Everything disintegrates, flakes away like dried flecks of sour milk. Fresh layers of disappointment erasing icy footprints leading nowhere.

At the end of a stupid and dull afternoon, night’s crudely Magic Markered in with squeaky slashes and scrawls. Now wind marionettes the wind chimes into spastic puppets. Your chest clenches.

After what can only be another sleepless night, who will come and scrape you off the ceiling in the morning like chewed-up gum with a putty knife?

2.

Way past closing time, and you want to walk in the dark with disheveled hair, moonlight juke-boxing its twangy lobotomy through your head. Stroll through the empty small-town downtown—where traffic lights blink their metronomical yellow. Past the historic courthouse. Past the Elk’s Club. Past Green Acres Hair Shack and down by the Pump-n-Stuff, where wild turkeys congregate at night, carousing around the gasoline islands until sunrise and swilling rain straight from the sky.

Maybe you’ll drunk-dial the fog and dance in its mist: Tango, fandango, bolero. Vaporous swirl and dip.

Maybe you’ll steal a boat, ride it down the river—all the way to the confluence; all the way to the ocean—until you’re swallowed up by something vast enough to randomly signify as joy.

And yes, helpless, this torque in the dark, because you’re nothing but pinballed ricochet, reckless electricity—sizzling the gridwork and pooling into the light bulb on a nightstand where someone you love but haven’t ever met turns the pages of a book early into the morning.

Can’t you hear the soft hum of golden lumens burning away the night?

3.

Dawn’s raw scraping awful when you’ve become a mollusk without a shell again. Seal shut your sleepless ears with iPod buds. Slow unfurl into blackness where each fish is peculiar in its own right. Blind, too. But at least they quietly mind their own affairs.

Music phosphoresces your veins and you blaze like a struck match. Cats’ eyes blink an indifferent green flash in response. Slow lumbering chafe of the snow plow—headlights hollowing out the alley like the camera of a BBC deepwater scientist. Alarm clock rolls over another red minute.

On days like this, you’ll turn on the bedside lamp before the alarm begins its spiteful bleating and, sitting outside the circumference of that hot yellow halo, you’ll cry on the side in the dark for awhile—steaming yourself open in this way like the envelope to an overdue bill or a letter full of inarticulate words, blurted in a hurry.

Later, outside, will it come as a surprise to find night’s sky peeled back like a sardine tin’s lid? Stars falling down in a brilliant icy clatter—effervescing your too-flushed cheeks, glittering your hair?

Until you realize, no . . . not stars, but snow.

4.

Giant tumbleweeds of wind gusting in off the plains—jangling the windowpanes’ glass tambourines, jim-jamming the wind chimes in a palsied, frostbitten jig. The bathroom fan clatters open and shut like a mechanical high hat. Wind so strong that, back in the distance, it’s timpani mallets in the back of the orchestra, rolling the storm forward through the dark.

Secretly, you love the unease, the unsettledness: How such a wind gives anxiety an exteriority. How its excessive spectacle, hubristic grandiosity—the Romantic grosse fugue of it—quavers the tractor-beam of your focus away from more interior obsessions.

(That endless hunch and fret over mismatched, ill-shaped puzzle pieces. Freeze and refreeze. Slipperiness and mess. What else to do but put on sensible shoes, tread gingerly?)

And yet . . . evening’s horizon marbled with creamy smears of fruit sherbet. The band of darkness wrapping each winter day like a tourniquet loosening its grip.

Later, 4:00 a.m.’s resolute stars with their obsolescent light from some other lifetime burn fierce offerings: A candle tribute mourning whom? A torch song aching for what?

And it’s just too much light. It won’t let you sleep. Truthfully, all you wish for right now is darkness and quiet . . . for this feral wind to blow out the cake candles, extinguish the sky.