Read This Vibrant Exposé, Ogden Nash.

Read This Vibrant Exposé.
by Ogden Nash.

Now curfew tolls in the old church steeple,
Bidding good night to sensible people;
Now thousands and thousands of people sensible
Think staying up later is reprehensible;
Now wives relentlessly bridge games terminate,
As thoughts of the morrow begin to germinate;
Now gangsters with pistols full of notches
Yawn discreetly and glance at their watches;
Now owls desist from to-wit-to-wooing,
And ne’er-do-wells from their ne’er-well-doing;
Now husband and wife and spouse and spouse
Unleash their cat and lock up their house;
Now celibates, of whom there are lots,
Wearily seek their lonely cots;
Now, in a word, the day is ended,
And a little sleep would be simply splendid.
But sleep is perverse as human nature,
Sleep is perverse as a legislature,
And holds that people who wish to sleep
Are people from whom away to keep.
Sleep, I am more than sorry to say,
Is deliberately half a world away.

The curfew that tolls in yonder steeple
Is unheard by a hemisphere of people.
Across the world, the alarm clock’s reveille
Wakes foreigners drowsy and dishevelly;
Across the world the sun is aloft,
And people must rise from their mattresses soft,
And polish their teeth and shine their faces
And go to work in various places.
Now opens wide their portal of day,
And sleep, you might think, would go away,
Sleep would abandon that hemisphere
And distribute its favors over here
But sleep is perverse as human nature,
Sleep is perverse as a legislature,
Sleep is as forward as hives or goiters,
And where it is least desired, it loiters.
Sleep is as shy as a maiden sprite,
And where it is most desired, takes flight.
So people who go to bed to sleep
Must count French premiers or sheep,
And people who ought to arise from bed
Yawn and go back to sleep instead.

And you can pile all the poems in the world in a heap,
And this is the first to tell the truth about sleep.