1.
Bad sleep is a quarter past wide awake
Bad sleep has no deadlines,
drags its feet and has no regard for time
bad sleep knows how to make silence sound the loudest
bad sleep knows the rules but doesn’t follow.
Bad sleep says “I know your body needs rest but what about me?”
Bad sleep has the worst hangover
Bad sleep drinks a lot of red wine and pretends it’s the blood of Jesus
And who wouldn’t want all things holy coursing through their veins?
Bad sleep goes to bed naked,
allows the gentleness of the breeze to flirt with the softness of skin
but still keeps your demons within earshot
bad sleep remembers every little detail,
bad sleep remembers too much
bad sleep gives birth to a million thoughts
and keeps you awake all night long.
Bad sleep is no sleep
No sleep means no dreams
And what’s life without a dream?
Bad sleep comes alive at 2am
And pushes your monsters to the front of the line
2.
This is not a poem.
This is a loophole of an unconscious body
This is a fear of a daydream imitating a nightmare
This is 3am on the bedroom floor
sieving the ugly out of your thoughts
This is the boy who sent tremors through your body on a Thursday night,
When we all know that the last time you witnessed an earthquake
you weren’t old enough to say vagina out loud
This is a new feeling in an old poem
It is the surprising veracity of your own breathing
It’s a trick of the dark, projecting monsters out of your consciousness
This is the voices in your head killing you before you can silence them
This is what you do with the pain of heartbreak
When it knocks the wind out of you
This is injecting other people’s realities into your life,
because you’re too familiar with your pain to smell the stench.
This is meeting nonexistent deadlines.
This is what you do with insomnia when it crawls into bed with you
When it maps out memories of events you’d rather forget
Nobody prepared you for this aching
Nobody told you sleeplessness comes with headaches
that pounds like a band playing a tune the devil would march to.
This is what insomnia looks like
3.
Love letter from Sleep.
Dear insomniac,
I may not have afforded you the luxury of lucid dreaming
I may not have offered you dreams of splendor and plenty
I may not have gifted you the beauty of not inheriting bags underneath your eyes
And I don’t think I’m particularly eager to change my mind about these things
But I pass through a million bodies every night and I swear to God,
when you stop overthinking, imagination will be yours forever.
The gods don’t envy you because you can die every evening and wake up new.
The gods don’t envy you because you have the power to live a thousand lives in every dream.
They envy you because you don’t need to die to be reborn
Because you’re sanctified by your struggles
Because you went to bed a sinner and somehow came out holy
There is a lot of dreaming to be done, but the gods can wait for a while,
Tonight, come and watch the stars with me.
asantewableedswords 