Buddy Wakefield Daylight Under the Bed (A Poem for the Year 2014) Bridget the bartender at Brooks and Browns on the flip side of the front entrance to the Holiday Inn on Pattee Street in Missoula, MT told me an old Catholic saying that goes something like this, "You cannot let the sun set on being pissed." This was my failure. There is a pattern I have worn in my pillow with bad days. There is a street lamp so sick of shining on pavement, an impatient plaster cast of kindness drizzled in the efforts of a greedy moth. Don't just stand with your hand on the kill switch watching like a wasted wish. Turn me off. I have so much blood when I wake up it rumbles under my ears a stampede of blazing horse rabies barreling toward my threshold. Put your head to my plunging chest if you still don't believe they are constantly coursing through my hiding spots they find me breathing too loud. I have been pulled out by the ankles. In these bones it is my understanding that whatever suffering is left of me when I die will translate and travel with me. On days like today this is the only reason I stay here. When I go I do not want to take this beast with me. Not one more step. I know better than to call a thing good or bad. I won't say that Hell is inappropriate. These detachment lessons are brilliant and burning. Who can sleep like this? These bursts of beast in my blind reactions belligerent and bombing around the space between pavement and the night furious with this life for being beautiful while I shake the haunted from my bed sheets, strip the years away from your vacancy release myself from being wilted in the way you walked away. There is so much blood in me when I sleep it pushes against my teeth. Waterfalls pound the rocks to paste. It tastes like smoked salt and thimble slits. Did you not see my nails raked back and bloodied? I worked feverishly for this bed sweat, boorish and run aground. Earth you dirty mothers apron smeared in father attacks and embroidered children who laughed and walked backwards while they watched me try to catch up, who split when word got out I was eyeing the physics of needlepoint, I was beginning to make astonishing sense. Their brothers tried sewing my lips shut. Double stitched. Horsehair and bar breath. Moths too eager for streetlights should not be in charge of sutures. Look at this mess. I constantly turn my pillow to feel the cool side on my neck so the tar in my lungs will level pave the way to safety unfold my forehead open letter to the victims of my bad behavior. Dense venom gone unchecked in my music. I have been trying to stay composed. The lyrics to candle spit. Lately I am a lonely country waving a landscape of flags across the consequences of intentional language. Fireflies in prison jars. Bald tires on ice. Guardrails that will not go the distance. Jungle gym bars. These oily hands. Missoula got ugly. Mississippi kiss me. A howling rush of simians through the throat of a white man begging to rearrange privilege so he can return to fitting in again. Safety is not my partner. Comfort did not grow up here in daylight under the bed. All the anger I found in your map to kindness. The groove where I was gutted. A shovel up of red lights in a tin can full of roads. My blood moves so fast it splits me like a tuning fork fighter jet threaded through a house fire rolled in the flicker of an aerosol can. A blast of boiled foam in the mattress where my head was supposed to rest. There was no rest when you lived here. Warm goes the whistle from a cold metal man. Sarah Healy, the floor sweeping, sandwich making, ocean swimming mother of Bassett Street on the flip side of the front entrance to the cathedral in Petaluma, CA told me an old personal realization once that went something like this, "The lesson will be repeated until it is learned."