How do you sleep when no-one's awake

How do you sleep when no-one's awake?
They're all asleep: how do you sleep?
I am cut off from so many lives
and it's in vain I seek myself out
in the labyrinth of my lives.
What is the calyx of the dark?
and what is the dark
that finds a place therein?
The empire of the real is an unframed picture.
A person might have seen the day
at the same time as this empire
—but no person could survive it.
The threshold of non-being resorbed the frame.
The real remains alone in the world...
Let us all become as ghosts
and we shall all be men.

 

Ion Caraion
tr. after the French of Vahé Godel