Tyrone Power

I am lying in my bed, lazy but not tired, and the feather duvet is splendid comfort, a cloud that lines the room with protection (from myself, from others) and turns the blue light of the television into the cool wash of the winter moon, mirrored by the white of everything:  the sheets, the walls, my bleached skin.  Spun back into the void by old Hollywood stars still burning on my unblinking blue eyes, the light is something like being underwater.  But I can breathe, deeply, congruent to the peace that these old melodramas provide.  I can breathe, and just now--as is the case rarely--being awake is better than sleeping.  Being alive is a plausible alternative to...

Breathing. 

My lungs expand and contract.  I inspire.  I will not expire.  What weight of death still stays with me is the opening for sleep, but I am watching.  Enjoying the old movie, I am awake.  I follow the plot effortlessly, and--as the night pervades me--the storyline starts to sink into me, leaking through my porous imagination, and into my brain. 

The television sees everything.  It accesses my dreams.  It colonizes and invades them.  These stories are a remedy for memory, an answer to the anxiety that aligns with tomorrow (and the day after tomorrow (and the day after that(and the..(...)))).

Before snoring...

The idea occurs to him.  The idea arrives on the stage, through the curtains like a nervous (but ambitious) actor wringing his hands, his mouth dry, before he begins the soliloquy from Shakespeare that he memorized a decade ago.  Still nothing.  Nothing still in the electric fire of his crowded nerves, the claustrophobic subways that allow him to return home, that allow him to escape again.  Tyrone Power would call such frayed ends of ganglia,  freedom.

"What does he know about it?"

Where does Tyrone Power begin and end and when does he, possessing me completely, become me, snatch my body and replace me?  When does he deface me and make a mask of his (heroic) handsomeness for me to wear?