Sleep is death.
Waking, birth.
Each night ends me
each dawn delivers
a reborn unfinished body.
But reborn into what?
light?
silence?
or the same shit
scraped with memory?
At night when darkness leans in
I do not pray.
I bargain that
before my daily rebirth
the monsters will crawl back
to the shadows.
They never recede
until they torment me
one last time
so their power can own me
well into the day.
I linger
suspended
between extinction and insistence,
watching my mind
unspool its theatre
until the actors
wear themselves down.
At last, I inch
toward the small gesture
a twitch, a breath, a turn
knowing each motion
maskis my suffering.
A trick against the grief
that waits
like an inheritance.
“before my daily rebirth” I dug that line because the rest we get (sometimes) refreshes us, although for some more than others, it’s likely the last time. It reminds me that I have to be thankful for every day I get and try to make the best of it.
Nicely done.
I turned 78 today, so I hear you loud and clear. Each night, one wonders if dawn, or something else, or nothing at all will come. We get one of them, but not our choice.