Insomnia has me at my window
watching moonlight in a flowerless garden
turn dead stems into haunted skeletons.
I feel the goodbye of petals that once
scented the starfields of night, phantoms
of bright color and perfume sacrificed for winter.
Melancholy deposits its chill along my skin
in pearls of grief because I too feel the frailness
of my resilience to push through the loam
of the coming year seeded with questions.
I’ve pruned the panic of November with
dull scissors down to manageable resistance.
Well, that's what I tell myself in the moments
my teeth aren't clinched with sarcasm.
I curse the dictionary for giving space
to the word unbearable…It stalks my vocabulary.
Also unprecedented has become a weed word for malicious.
©Susie Clevenger 2024
So true. I feel frail too, and so weary. Your closing line could not be more accurate. I am disheartened.
ReplyDeleteI'm cursed by a rare insomnia, that of my incessant desire to rise early and write no matter how many fucking New Year's fireworks go off dead of night. ... The icy granularity of the sleepless reverie here is so haunting-fine, a wintry melancholia to which is added a heavier dread of a malice growing at the border. (Does it have orange hair?) Finely, sharply, bluely felt. The insomnia has a purpose, the melancholia an ink.
ReplyDeleteA "weed word"! Is that a thing or did you invent it? Either way, that one is going into my Funk & Wagnall's. Insomnia is a bitch to be sure; I struggle with it intermittently.
ReplyDeleteI can feel the weight of passing time and sadness - I hope the months will brighten in time - Jae
ReplyDeleteYou set the scene for these midnight musings so well, Susie. I can feel the cold glass between me and the garden tamed by cold the narrator looks out upon, the reflection it gives of that cold that has crept into the heart, despite all the panic pruning and desire to resist. Resistance takes will and gristle and I sometimes feel these last few years have chewed all that within us to the bone.I especially like the last stanza, with its persistent and vicious stalkers--not physical, but mental--which haunt our sleepless nights. Fine writing.
ReplyDeleteI love the fourth stanza. You're spot-on re: "unprecedented".
ReplyDelete