fire

Last night was a bedful of communist penguins (there were thirty-seven of them) and a clenched fistful of fevered dreams. The red penguins are from a recurring dream i've been having for months. In those dreams there are a hundred and twenty-six of them living in a secret mothership disguised as an iceberg. Their good ship is aptly named 'Der Hammer von Karl Heinrich Marx'. As for the penguins themselves, I have only so far gleaned the names of ten:

Caffeine, Piety, Greed, Honor, Janice, Humor, Humar, Gaiety, Pan and Saint Epilepsy.

Caffeine and Pan were my favorites; mostly because they were the only ones who had spoken to me in english so far. None of them were talking last night though. They just stood silent, thirty-seven penguins staring; one of them happily standing on my chest.

Somewhere between sleepless zombieness and fevered delirium i was only struggling to stay awake because i was curious to see if they would fall asleep before i passed out-- because i had always wanted to know how penguins sleep. Even aboard Der Hammer von Karl Heinrich Marx i was never privy to a visit to their sleeping quarters (if they had any) and the question had been nagging at me for months.

No answers were forthcoming that night, though, because sometime between three and four, the lead penguin (the one perched on my chest), opened it's beak and utterred a solitary word:

"Zerstören.", it said.

And i closed my eyes to the sound of penguin word like lullaby. And i gave myself to dream.

Do you know how penguins sleep?