S.A.D.

SAD

I am holding onto sanity with bleeding fingernails

Lingering right off this edge

I feel pushing on the center of my chest like pressurized air

I cannot breathe I cannot breathe I cannot

Sleep is a figment of imagination

Dancing around my eyelids and flirting with my desperate attempts to escape from reality

This chain and ball on my ankle has named itself and seated next to me while I smoke pack after pack of menthol cigarettes

My fingers drum continuously against the side of my leg hoping for some remnant of pain hidden behind denim jeans years ago

Stone eyes weigh down my head and spin my golden threaded spine with nightmares of the past I thought I’d left behind

And I only remember when I startle awake because I think the monster has returned from behind his red curtain

Glass hands filled with smoke shake as I try to wash away the pictures in my mind that flicker like old film

I can only speak through eighth notes, every heartbeat on rest

I can only scream through poetry because emotions don’t exist off the page

I cannot breathe I cannot

From what hell has this darkness risen to take me prisoner?

What depth of my sane in sane mind?

I have learned to keep my monsters under the bed where they belong but I am a child again and now I have fear once more

I should not have hidden them there

They whisper promises of calamity and sanity until I’m leaning over with my fingers at the edge of the bed, clutching tightly

But I’ve clutched so tightly that blood drips and my monsters hiss in delight

The film flickers so fast I cannot even pause or rewind or begin to forget as I remember what was taken from me to make the scenes behind my brain

I cannot breathe

Numbing cold and white noise beckons me under so I take the hand of darkness

It’s like holding the hand of an old friend as he passes me a cigarette laced with dreams and sleep

Slumber so wonderful it taints my eyelids aquamarine and my voice vibrates yellow as if burned by the sun

Sun that breeds light travels down my trachea to the center of my chest and blooms into a sunflower

Warmth like fire races in my veins and I realize it is oxygen

I can breathe