“and if you could mute feeling and deprive life, would you?”

i peel myself off pale, clinging sheets,
lethargy pooling under my eyes,
dark side of the moon hugging waterline,
readying for frosted floorboard’s touch on mine.

every night i’m awake: found speaking to the moon,
curled up on my side, talking with stars, waiting for echos back.
so i rise with the dawn, my soul in the past.
could cut me down and i’d still somehow last.

and so i ask: does it feel painful to draw this all out?
with this monotonic tick tick ticking away—
i should be seeing something, hearing something—
yet the clock paused and time’s still ongoing.

the world screams for my attention by its simple being,
wanting to get through to me that it’s moving on.
but i’m just waiting for day’s end,
so just stick it behind soundproof walls and call it a mend.

straight into bloodstreams and right back out.
lead me under; amnesia takes me now.
glazed over eyes: static filling fields of vision,
blurring all things tangible; i may as well not have risen.

when the news threw its punches,
and left me washed up on the shore,
i only met its ghost so i never made a sound,
thinking at this point, i’m certain i’ve drowned.

evading anything that reaches for me,
with all intensity turned down.
blocked pain pathways
and slowed spiraling segues.

could make it faster, take it harder, posture some pain.
it doesn’t stop the drifting in and out.
i just take a breath, i always do,
a reminder nothing changes, at least not for you.

woke up hooked to the same drip,
periodic loss—sedation filling each precious gap.
as if i’m not perpetuating the plug back in,
to dilute this life, that’s how it’s always been.

it keeps me down, it keeps me indifferent.
the absence of a life that’s living.