Survivor

It doesn’t come as easily now.

Always when I want it least,

Never when I need it most.

I wait and lie in the darkness but

It doesn’t claim me.

Like a moth to a flame,

I am drawn close to burn and hover

But my wings hold me back from those midnight pleasures.

Keeping me from the scorching dreamscape.

Yet is comes in fits and bouts like an indecisive plague.

It consumes me in tumultuous waves and drowns me,

Only to find myself breathing as it deserts me.

It is erratic, wild; a pixyish entity that thrives on

My dark circles and red-eyes and silent sobs in the night.

When it allows me dreams, I am lost in labyrinthine structures;

Worlds that defy my imagination, my reality.

 It always leaves me wondering why

It doesn’t come as easily now.

The innovations we know are the survivors of late-night massacres. Midnight thoughts slaughtered and buried in the recesses of our minds all because we think sleep is necessary. Yet sleep does not come for sometimes survivors turn civilizations. No wonder the poets and philosophers are deemed insane. Their minds are the thriving cities the stars have made their home in; mere hundreds of the ancients out of the billions of the desolate. For if sleep is conquered like the beast it is, we open ourselves to a world of obsidian echoes. Survivor’s guilt is a powerful thing.