portrait of a sleepless night

The day is my enemy. The day lies in wait and assails with knives of light of yellow and red and white and night, night is the infirmary. Night is a rose-petal trail of blood from the stairwell to the bed. It is lying catatonic, waiting for a nurse who never comes, who i know will never come, but for whom i have no choice but to wait.

The night is fluid. The night is solid. The night is a tetanus that writhes and locks in turn, transporting me to all manner of physical manifestation without once moving me from the bed. At one moment, lurid ecstasy wherein the form beneath all forms seems to reveal itself to me where the curtain is ripped and the truth of the grand machine's operator exposed in revelations fit more for meter and measure of music than mere exclamation of word. In these heights of experience, joy and sorrow and suffering and bliss sublimate into a delphic climax, and at last i understand why prayer is sung rather than uttered.

The night is fluid. The night is solid. The night is the root of the word: awe. Lying there like a shell-shocked soldier, the terrific is subsumed into terrere and reemerges as the terrible. The severity of my daylight wound all too obvious now, the suffering persistent without any measure of meaning. Tremulant agony of bleeding out there alone in infirmary, the occasional mustering of strength to arise and pack myself with all manner of gauze to find relief, to shout down the corridors of a hospital with no other rooms and no other people and no exits in the vein hope that someone may hear and come to my aid. The awe is that of an awful perdition.

In these latter times, i dare not look at the clock which hangs opposite of me. The movement of its hands inching ever-toward another hour seem to spell damnation and instill within me a fear that the twilight is endless. "Here lies another victim of sleepless ruin," i can imagine my epitaph echoing. "Here lies a senseless unfolding of the days into night and night into day. Here lies a life without chapters, without punctuation."

Whether it be by way of lyricism or damnation, the darkness is chased into the corners of the room once more. The morning star takes its station in the east, casting a slow stream of daybreak which threatens first by peeking above the rooftops before exploding across the landscape. I rise and tentatively take my leave through an exit made manifest by the dawn. Though the bleeding has ceased, the wound remains. The desperation now an exhaustion.