Unrest

Eyelids are heavy as robust steel, I cannot keep them up… I want to stay awake, I want to fall asleep… I am stuck in a tantrum of dilemma…

There is a cacophony in my head like pummelling of a thousand war drums. “I need some sleep” I keep on telling those drum beaters. Indeed a war needs to be fought, but not now, please not now… “I need some sleep”

I close my eyes and a world of utter grim blackness writhes and coalesces into a gluttonous black raven. It looks at me with an athirst, an athirst feeding on my dreams… the accursed animal keeps rapidly cawing and gnawing in my head… whispering in a soporific melody “you need some sleep”

My fingers are twitching with fatigue, my knees hurt like an eternal malady. It’s cold, too cold to fall asleep… but perfect to die… but death is a manner of sleep, only endless. And here I am unable to fall into a temporary one. There is a picture in my head, it makes me laugh.

There is a boor…
felling a tree…
with an axe…
and I am the boor when he strikes the tree with all his might, panting, sweating, weary and broken. I am the axe when it kisses the bark and loosens splinters off of the mighty tree, grinding, eroding, vexed by an agonizing pain every stroke. I am the tree when it falls asunder and yonder, the massive wooden edifice crushed and reduced to dead boles of timber for the hewers.

In the whole picture… I empathize with all three… I am tired, eroded and fallen asunder… there is an agony I have been impregnated with, a demonic progeny of triplets, who at birthing will tear me apart with a torture threefold…

I pick myself up… look out the window and stare at that dog… the one posed motionlessly at the pavement… deathly silver eyes like the crystal ice in the ninth circle of hell… they stare back with the same everlasting melancholy. 

That miserable black hound bleeds from one eye and cries from the other, yelping and baying at me like a wolf under the full moon… I hum a melody as the mongrel bays, the nocturne to the sleepless night…

Another picture slips into my imagination, it makes me weep.

There is a field of coxcomb…
under vindictive wildfire…
with thunderous downpour…
and I am that flower that bloomed the brightest and now burns with the most radiance, as others around me burn as well, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I am that wildfire that is never satiated, rigorously spreading its fangs to devour it all like a demon Manticore, to prey on the weak and fall alongside their debris. I am that downpour that arrived ever so late… a mute and meek watcher of the carnage after the butchery, the provider of graves, not the preventer.

I weep… I weep ever so long… empathizing with the flower, the fire and the rain. The flower that bloomed but never blossomed, the fire that burned but never lasted, the rain that poured but ever so late… I weep for long… I weep for them all… children of the abyss, passed to the grave… my children, my abyss, their graves…

Hints of daybreak… come creeping below the doors and windows, dimly lighting up my barren room. A room of minimalistic décor, as empty as its occupant. It’s too late to fall asleep and too early to wake up… a fistful of oxymoronic situation is what my life has become… once again I fight the dreary battle against insomnia… “But to what avail???” I ask…

A last picture draws itself upon my mind… a moving picture…

A billion screaming people…
In front of a shining white figure…
A mighty sermon awaits…
The figure shines with great erudition and veneration, the massive aggregation of common folks look at him with gaping mouth and pale sleepless eyes soaked in tears. He said listen and they all listened… he said kill your love and they all killed their love… he said kneel and weep and they all knelt and wept… then he said pray and sleep and they all prayed and slept… so peacefully, ever so peacefully…

I stood there alone standing and sleepless in a dormant crowd of sheep, mongrels and dastards… staring in the eyes of their beholder…

“One day shall come… and you will say fall and die… and they all will fall and die???” I asked… he never answered… he merely smiled and faded away…

I stood there alone, awake and unanswered.

"There are questions unanswered, emotions untended, maladies unhealed...
There is a might unrest starving my slumber, reverberating inside my skull...
To cull this woe, must I seek that white figure?

Or must I stay awake amidst a sleeping crowd?...
Must I stay alive 'midst a crowd of dead?..."