Edison's Easy Chair

While drowsily trying to think of a poem, I remembered that Thomas Edison, the American inventor of the light bulb, used drowsiness to his advantage.  I hope the poem makes it clear how.

                                             Edison’s Easy Chair

                                                           Genius is one percent inspiration,
                                                           ninety-nine percent perspiration.
                                                                                    Thomas Edison

                                   Still he knew invention lay in that blurred
                                   Borderland between awake and asleep,
                                   So he flanked his favorite chair with tin pans
                                   And held ball bearings in his clenched hands
                                   Till he dozed off and their clattered dropping
                                   Would rouse him to record some new idea –
                                   Our world long lit by his light bulb moments.

                                   But what escaped him in his deeper sleeps
                                   When no noise could awake him: perpetual
                                   Motion, the water engine, or world peace?
                                   He claimed genius was only one percent
                                   Inspired, but without that smallest spark
                                   The other work is only so much sweat
                                   And blood and tears shed by the uninspired.
                                   What noise will it take to wake us from our sleep?


Note:  There is a legend about someone who invented the water engine, an engine that runs on water rather than gas, and was then killed by the big oil companies.  David Mamet has written a very goo play by that name about this legent.