the cat stole my sleep
The birds of disquiet announce my growing insanity. I was woken up by the cat I like the least as it somehow opened my bedroom door. I have no privacy and no one hears my mute and tireless screams. A desperate thought escapes my gut as I suppress the evil taste of sleepless poverty and unpaid debt. Like the blackened bile that spreads throughout these pristine mountain lungs, an unseemly worry feeds cancer-like on my inability to express sadness without rage, hope without despair, and fatigue without resentment. I will not go back to sleep
I seethe in resentment for the cat that woke me up, the birds outside who dare sing elegies to the dreams that could have been, the sleep I so desire, and the mind that doesn’t let me.
In these hours of desperation, I find solace in the coke-fueled musings of many insomniacs before me. Their highs ring true to the lows I so often yearn to describe but fail to put in words or thoughts. My misery is expressed in action, and its body is always awake, restless out to get me. The noisy grain of these sabotaged lids has pulled its weight for years. A mechanised sandman awaits my weakest hours to melt my eyes and sandpaper my balls until only a sleepless eunuch remains, galaxies away from who it was or where I should be. A neutered dreamer, once a powerful poet, then a Nietzschean incel, now a forgettable existence on 4chan, soon to disappear. A post nobody will ever find, a mind too dumb to get to sleep, a laptop too resource-intensive to produce anything worthwhile, guilt-free.
How I envy those who sleep. Their mindless breaths in that weakest state, with dreams begging for the cleansing grace of sunlight. But alas, the moon is my sun, its cold blank stare informs the inadequacy of my vision, a hovering monument to the daily winter I hunger through. I converse with a screen whose blue light tricks me, escalating my confused nerves to the high noon of late-night dissociation. It’s too early to get up, but too late to fall asleep. I type and delete unsaid wishes in group chats I blame for this very state. How selfish I am to drag others down to my being awake. If only slumber could kill the man I am right now. If only drugs could fill the void for four to five hours. If only love could make me sleep. In these dastardly hours, only a rageful heart could keep me awake. I am the symptom of my disease, the alarm of my headings, the head on my pillow, whose whispers I tirelessly listen to, in hopes they’ll reveal secrets of the unconscious. But in the end, I am nothing more, nothing less than the words on my desk. I write as if it cures at all, and when reread, it never does. And if writing doesn’t help, I guess that nothing will.
I bite my lips
and push the cat
to teach it not
to knock on wood
of doors concealing madness
from a chamber where no sleep can thrive
and as I do it, twice, in fact,
I feel the sadness of the cat,
and weigh it on my own regret
of never having slept, for real
this night, I think, is for the books
that no one ever cares to read
and if I cease to write it down
my life has been for nothing