Excellent use of ‘know’ . People often use this word too offhandedly but here the piece examines what it really means to know and almost walks around the verb looking at it from every angle. I wonder if maybe in the first stanza ( I’m using this word rather than paragraph as it seems more appropriate) you might consider leaving a gap between any thing and no thing as then this would also take the commonplace words anything and nothing and make it more of an echo about the fundamental difference between a thing and a person and also leaves the rhyme echo between know and no quite strongly evocative…but that’s only a suggestion. This piece has a very strong feel about all those ‘what if’ or ‘perhaps’ moments. It’s interesting that you left out question marks as this does unclutter the work and doesn’t seem ungrammatical as the tone of the piece nudges us to understand these are not really questions but steps towards the real question of why.
This poem makes progress while wearing the same clothes it started in… if you will— that’s the closest I can come to describing what I really mean :) The narrator knows what she said, she needed sleep, she needed you (the person for whom this is for) but both seem to be untrue. In my mind she needed sleep because she was done with this person she said she needed, even if she hadn’t known it then. Just my take on it.
In Night's Arms
THX 0477
Writearound
Kay-Teaze
Tad Winslow
Abby (LoA)