Old familiar existence
presses me again.
Deprived, I am.
Deprived the self of living,
lie awake at night.
Lie is a lie.
Instead, stand or sit, and stimulate.
Let lights shine on and blind the night.
And then let obligation wash over me.
Pressure me
to the place between itself and night.
It eats away at my sleep, it eats away, except it doesn't,
at least it didn't. It didn't begin this way.
Before obligation ate the night—
I injured it first.
Deprived, I am.
Deprived myself of living.
Push forward! Push ahead.
Follow your passion, your passion
at the expense of the day.
Follow your passion, follow desire,
into the night.
Eat the night.
Let sleep eat the day.
Light of day, artificially shortened,
(let sleep eat the day), options limited,
what is left to eat, but the night?
And let sleep eat the day,
and I will follow my passions into the dark
until night becomes day,
and I've eaten that too.
Let sleep eat the day?
What of when I have eaten day too?
What then? Then—
Deprived, I am.
Injured, I am.
My swollen bloodshot eyes.
Constricted bloodlet mind.
This is when obligation rears.
Obligation eats the night,
I eat the day, and sleep somewhere in between
finds its own heavy existence,
And I lie down and come with it, for brief moments.
(Lie is a lie. It takes more than it was given, slipped
from my hands, slipped from control.)
What has not slipped from control?
This is when obligation rears.
Now obligation eats the night,
sleep eats the day.
Where am I.
Before obligation ate the night—
I slipped from control.
How can I take control, when
my fingers and tendons are weak,
never once shown how to use them.
Obligation reminds me,
I've run out of time,
let myself down, as well as others.
Enraged——
my hands don't work
i've no control
i get nothing done
where am i——
Aristotle says, anger is caused by pain.
Deprived, I am.
Injured, I am.
Pain. I hurt.
All of this placed on my shoulders.
But I was never good at despair.
How did I deal with such things before?
The capacity for pain
is not the optimal expression of strength.
Time will move me past this pressure,
And maybe my fingers will work as once they did.
How did I deal with such things before?
A touch or madness. Loud, intense revelry.
"Possessed with hellish torment, / I master magics five."
And perhaps, some intimation of resilience.
"Even if all my bones are broken,
I will drag myself back from the edge."
Immediately, I walk into a new day.
(Walk, because obligation has eaten the night.)
All of this still on my shoulders,
Pushing my head forward, but not down.
I will have to do something about my fingers.
For now: resilience, and a touch of madness.
Daniel Triumph.
Been a while since I wrote some long, bad poetry. I think this could actually be pretty good if I cut it down to half and maybe clarified some elements. For now? A touch of madness.
I would like to get back to doing a short story of some sort, but for now my mind is quite…deprived, so I can’t quite think constructively at that level. I have some ideas stirring though.
P.S.
