I don't know what number this is.

Mother of pearl. I definitely just spent the last hour and fifteen minutes sitting in the computer lab writing a less-than-mediocre poem instead of doing the massive amounts of work that I have due tomorrow. Whoops.

You won't let me catch you sleeping.
We sit silently on the daybed
in the sun room after midnight, shrinking back
into the shadows, skirting the fuzzy lights
of the color television broadcasting in black and white.
No floor boards creak -- everyone's asleep -- but you
[and I]
stare intently at the screen, thieving fleeting glimpses --
attempts to catch the movie playing in each our eyes.
Glasses serve as shields but can't stave off wayward raids
and the night makes us susceptible
to imperceptible waves of sudden indefinable need
to ask for what we should not have
that is not ours
that should not be.
I won't give up, you won't give in: no surrender, no one wins.
So we just sit, side by side, in the bleakest early light.
The TV becomes a dream to me as I slip into a rapturous repose,
and you become a figment, a sentinel at his post watching over me
with a sincerity that I can't see. Suddenly awake,
you stay to watch me sleep, and somehow I can sense it:
your irrefutably unaffected affection sweetens my dreams.
It spreads through my reverie as you kiss my forehead
and slip away unseen. But the aura doesn't linger,
and when I wake in midday, the television is color once again.
Did you catch me sleeping?
Did you enter my dreams?
Or was it just a black and white movie
playing out on a color TV?