Bound Books, Samisdat, 1979

Herewith, the latest selection from dusted-off published poetry and short fiction, circa 1970s vintage and beyond....

Sleep Walking

This stiff-upper-lip voice
floating at me
through my radio;
this upper-class British voice
that I alternately envy and deride;
describing new research
into the incidence of
sleep-walking,
and one of the symptoms,
one of the ways you can tell,
is by the victim's (?) GLAZED EYES.
Is that how?
Could be my life is one
whole sleep-walking experience.
And he goes on to say
it's a fallacy; they don't die of shock
if precipitately
brought out of their sleep-walking, and
goes on to give an example of some woman
who had an 'unfortunate'
tendency to sleep-walk
in the wee hours of the morning
- naked - and that's
how her husband invariably discovered her:
walking the streets, naked.
"It distressed her husband enormously"
the voice said. Well yes, it would.
But women are like that,
always dreaming of
walking the streets,
through few of us do it
naked
and fewer yet
die of mortification when
precipitately brought to reality.

c. 1979 Rita Rosenfeld
published in Bound Books