cyclic calcified calluses of sleeplessness
This poem explores my experience with depression and insomnia, alongside the shame that follows every sleepless and solemn night of solitude. Ever since I was 12, I've struggled with endless racing worries, an overly contemplative mind, and constant anxiety that would leave me on edge and unable to turn my thoughts off to sleep. As I got older, I began to struggle with depression and extreme disassociation, which led to the sleepless nights becoming more and more frequent, until they became my normal for years.
After years of battling against my mental health alone, I started to take my writing more seriously and created poetry as an outlet for all of my unspoken feelings and fears. I've loved poetry, reading and writing it, ever since I was a preteen, but I've recently begun to channel more of my soul into what I write in hopes of it resonating with someone else's healing journey, and also to help me trek through my own.
I hope that this poem reminds you that there is always someone awake with you, there with you, even when your mind convinces yourself that this is the most isolated you'll ever be, that your heart and hopes are the most bleak that someone's can ever become.
I’ve become well-acquainted with my good friend Nightfall, though she leaves me
awake until dawn without the warmth of sleep —
woeful wet eyes peering at storms murking in the casket, granting eclipses as they roar at full forte
To form pulpy craters that rupture free with no warning oozing out
constant anaesthetic numbing nothingness calcifying quickly into a fresh callus
that mingles freely among its only companion
Familiar vacuums in my aptitude skilled at suctioning everything and anything
from my being — besides the void itself, personalized
into a cyclic waxing moon.
Crying come hither to the countless bewitching comets alluring to my spirit
Serving as an unsolicited mutation as they embrace a debilitated witness
leaving my crux christened to perish.
Entrusted with a newfound eternity, an absoluteness of my wasted reality
they relish in elation as they swallow me whole —
leechers ravaging in my sickness.
Once I delicately kissed my northern star, blinking back tears cascading in awe yet
sorrow of her; this part of me alive a millennia past
an once blazing beacon now bruised and blackened. Hastily she scrambles
blanket veiling her blemishes and there’s so many swelling up viciously
croaking out for someone, anyone; a mere carcass near expiration
— all crimson marrow with no bones.