The father feeds her his melancholic disposition. She takes it.

I would maybe like to leave this behind.  For me, leaving it behind means taking it from the back.

But this might not be a good way to do it, to leave it behind, to take it from the back. To go around, loquaciously deferring. A savvy circumlocution. Circum, they say, means to go around roundly. Perhaps blindly. As in melancholia, it may go on for some time. Like a game, if you like. Pin the tail on the donkey.

Blindfolded. Sometimes we are. Once I was. Well. Not when I saw my father sleeping that time. He was holding his soft knob. He was asleep. His hand was circum his cock. Does that make sense? His hand was casually wrapped around it roundly. Sleepyhead. I write it with the deepest affection, as though I were recalling a still of John Giorno from Andy Warhol’s Sleep.

It’s not so long before I am taking it from the back, scraping it from the underside of someone else’s dream. I walk backward out of the room quietly like I’m Paul in his sister’s dream. Walking oddly. Like the dead. In reverse. Back.

Death, Djuna Barnes said, is intimacy walking backward.

Paul and his sister. My dad and me. All walking backwards, dreamily, still dreaming.  Hold on. Keep talking. We are almost asleep.

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The Somnambulist is a transcript of the mind after midnight; it may also be read as a soliloquy for sleep.