sleep my child

words by clement tan 2004

i wish sleep cures all ills.
i wish i was a child.
blissfully ignorant of the damned world.

i need to sleep now.
respite from the harshness of the reality.
that plagues the very consciousness.
the very denial
that the proverbial frog in their wells so very persist.

i wonder if they sleep peacefully.
is their sleep fitful as they are mindlessly
glorifying in the mardi gras
of the contemporary relative age.

to a soldier caught in war
wearied by the vestiges of battle
death is sleep and sleep is death.
the eternal battle between man's inability to handle the painful truth
and the plain truth --
to die is to sleep, to sleep is to die.

oh what a wonderful world.