sleep

The day wanders as it will, all hot and bothered, graceless and aimless and littered with glass and shrapnel. I sit and smoke with my insignificance, thinking about all the things I don’t want to think about, full of want and lack. It isn’t the day’s fault, I’ve always been like this, maybe more so now that the manic doesn’t happen so often. It isn’t as if the night has my back. The drift to drowse and dream a toss of the dice. The moon either a blue sky scar or a gravid taunt of lost love and babies exed out of existence. Flies light upon my head and hands, creep along my blood sugar wounds and my open sores. They are way ahead of the game, as the elders tend to be. 

The moon was little less than rapturous as I woke last night, my attempt as sleeping off this dismal blue only a nap to wake to the big black dog heavy on my heart. Shining bright with Jupiter and Saturn in august attendance, the remainder of my reminders of the last abandonment, the consort of her heart of bloom and stone. My own coterie of anhedonia and ideation keeping me company through the rat gnawed night. A little toss and turn, some tobacco to burn, while the symptoms get worse and the way out seems just the big one way. The moon crowned the scrubby pines and stoic cypress, as lovely and unconcerned as the last heartbreaker that left me in her wake.

Sleep eludes me still, and when it comes, it never lasts long enough. There’s always some alarm on its way, some bell beaten with a bar, some clanging to rouse me from my corner towards the next cheap shot to my chops. I doze in the early morning, I nap in the afternoon, I get a few winks in some nights only to wake in the darkened affect of my consequences. Dreams rarely bring delights or respite, just the wandering through imagined trails, or shuffling through the crowded hallways of the dead. The occasional nightmare that threatens death, but doesn’t deliver, or the return of a lost love to hate my guts and liver. Too poor for the insurance that supplied the antipsychotic that allowed me to get a solid four hours, to broke to manage the magnitude of self medication that will drop me like a brick. I would stay in my lane if there was a direction, stick to my strengths if I had any. Instead I am swarmed by words that do me no favors, left to idle on empty, waiting for an end to dead.