Attempting to capture the tumultuous thoughts from the POV of someone with depression. |
The Sleeper A cumbersome block of lead-- I carried it in the thing that some obnoxious self-righteous preacher called my soul. A shortage of serotonin-- it was called by some doctor with a clipboard and some unacknowledged financial goal. Even some people (my family), hovering in the blurry periphery of my existence, let out some useless tumbling words. Among the shadowy things of which I was not consciously aware, lingered the the reek of dizzying relentless despair. I will try my best to tell you about a day in the life of one with this sickness of the mind. At the budding of the day, I lost all sense of the refracted pasts when I had no weight to bear. A drumbeat pounded through my breath topped by a screaming treble riff- here is all that I recall: The warbler warbled from a branch on a snag on a hill. While the dawn yawned from the east, the birdsong burst through my sleeping will. While the golden day loomed, gloomy, over my rest, the feather-puffs trilled like the fathers and mothers who claim to know best. Forgive my unfiltered deliberations. I experience these memories, through closed eyes, with a bizarre fuzzy vividness. Anyway... the blundering tune: The night's pitch languished in my whitened shell. The dead do not rise and I was not alive, not as far as anyone could tell. In the brightening sky the small singers flew free. I told myself it was time to rest but those tiny brats sang 'We disagree! We disagree!' I groaned sideways in my soft tomb and whispered into myself 'The birds are not right. 'The birds are not right. I will sink away peacefully because the birds... they can't be right... After that there isn't much to tell... there I rotted until after the darkness came. The birds fell silent when the sun sank away and still, fermenting in my juices, I lay. Understand that when the glow seems a black hole, the sleeper is haunted. On that day the free-flyers chimed, and the sleeper, the sleeper, sleeper... and the sleeper was nobody... but the sleeper was me. This is supposed to be a poem about depression. More specifically, its supposed to be a bit of a sardonic jab at how irrational one can be when depressed. (Consider it an attack on the illness, not the person.) With the first few draft of this, it became obvious that my message was too understated. I've made some edits to this since, in hopes of making my intentions more clear. Have I succeeded? Have I overcompensated? Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks! |