nighttime hallucinations,
I try to fall asleep
to the sound of famous people
having conversations
about what it’s like to be all famous
and lucky and fortunate —
how wonderful it is
to get to do the things
they were meant to do…
nocturnal ruminations,
I toss and turn,
flip pancakes and butter up
waffles with whipped cream on top,
a breakfast feast that’s just a fiction
to a sick and hungry mind…
PM devastations,
I reflect on all the ways
this world isn’t what it’s supposed to be —
how if we’re all so focused
on individual prosperity
and material gain,
this whole experiment is bound to fall apart…
we must help one another, spread the wealth,
and create a life of fruitful curiosity
and universal self-motivated creative work…
dreamscape revelations,
I need to get a warmie…
I love the cow — she’s super cute
but I also want one of those adorable fruits…
she says her warmie is life-changing —
I could use life-changing…
lucifugous declarations,
it can be hard feeling sick
when you’re all by yourself
it can feel exhausting trying to battle
a system on the rocks —
the brain short-circuits and you find yourself
lost in a fog…
come find me in the fog tonight
and lead me to safety
Garbage Notes:
Sometimes I like to fall asleep to podcasts. And one podcast in particular that I found myself listening to last year was the Talking Sopranos Podcast.
It’s interesting, falling asleep to famous people having conversations with one another and then interviewing other famous people. It’s like the stuff you notice them talking about is always like how fortunate they are to have gotten their lucky breaks on such and such a film. Or how amazing it was to be on set with these other amazing actors. Or like how they met this one key person at a casting call and it launched their entire career.
Anyway, it’s just strange sometimes being a regular human being who’s struggling to get by in life and you find yourself falling asleep to these totally alien celebrities who in some way seem so relatable because they represent characters from your favorite TV show, but on the other hand as actual people they are like the least relatable constructs imaginable. You just know that there’s probably zero percent overlap in the kinds of experiences they have on a moment-to-moment basis and the kinds of shitty muddling-through-garbage sort of days you are stuck having on the reg.
And yet the whole experience of listening to them is supposed to be fun and relaxing and totally chill enough to fall asleep to. I don’t know. But that’s the kind of shit that was rattling around in my head when I wrote this poem. Part of it is naked jealousy and envy of what it must actually be like to be super famous and successful. And the other part is pretty much me tossing and turning over the sheer irony of how easy and zen it is for me to fall asleep to these famous people’s soothing voices.
I guess you have to hand it to them. There is a reason they are where they are—they have talent, they communicate well, and they have charm. And that’s always going to be the kind of thing people want to inundate themselves with. But it’s also important to maintain a healthy degree of distance and perspective. We have to understand that there’s a lot of luck involved in finding fame. And there’s probably millions of unknown people out there who have equally entertaining and soothing podcast-quality voices that just never get their opportunity to share themselves with the world to the same degree as say Micheal Imperioli and Steve Schirripa, aka Christopher and Bobby from The Sopranos.
Okay, moving on—so the rest of the poem involves some wordplay with me finding various ways to riff on the concept of nighttime hallucinations. Phrases that are kind of similar in meaning and pair well together acoustically, that kind of thing. I don’t often write stuff for the sheer sound of the words—I’m more of a semantics-first guy than a flowery-but-vacuous-prose guy, but I’ll admit you get a little bit of that meaningless bullshit here, especially with the whole ‘lucifugous declarations’ thing—like seriously in hindsight I kinda hate that line. But whatever.
And lastly, I definitely like how the poem ends with the whole ‘battling a system on the rocks’ bit. Life and reality feels a little bit broken and a whole lot unfair most of the time. But what can we do. We only get one life, and no matter how grand or simple it is, we must live it and find some semblance of love and happiness. Because in the end, I think we all want to be rescued out of the fog and be brought back home to safety. (Yeah, that, or you can get yourself a warmie!)
Franco Amati 2024
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I love the little bits of rhyme here, and the breakneck pace. It seems to me that this poem was not meant to be read slowly, each word savored and mulled over, nope, it rushes at you, pushing you along, just like it feels when you've been going for 18 hours and can't settle down to rest even though the opportunity is here, now and if you don't take it it'll be more than 18 hours before it comes again. That's what this one says to me. Another good one Franco. Just how I'm feeling right now.
Substack sort of rescued me from the fog, but I could probably use a warmie, too. I don’t mind night time hallucinations, it’s the ones in broad daylight that get to me.