I’ve only written two poems in my entire life. Well, that’s not entirely true. I used to write lyrics for a band my friends and I were forming that never got off the ground. I’ve been in a bad place as of late and jotted this down last night to kind of try to help me through what I’m going through. I don’t know if it makes sense or if it’s any good, but I thought I’d share it here. Maybe it can help someone else. Maybe I’m just screaming into the void as usual. Like I said, I’ve just been in a bad way and felt the need to write something and couldn’t come up with anything but these words. I didn’t do much thinking on it. I just wrote down what came to mind. Just my own discombobulated mind spilled out on paper and now here on the Internet.

I wake up each morning
as if returning to a mistake I didn’t make.
The sun rises out of habit,
and I rise out of spite.

Some days my mind is a broken cathedral,
echoing with sermons I never asked to hear.
Other days it’s a carnival mirror–
every reflection warped
every laugh track broken.

There is a rhythm to the collapse,
a pulse that insists I keep going
even when I want to negotiate my exit
with whatever god still bothers
to read the fine print of my thoughts.

Bipolar dawns come and go:
one morning I am incandescent,
a lighthouse for a ship that will never arrive;
the next I am the ocean floor,
quiet enough to make silence uneasy.

But existence refuses to end on cue.
It drags on with the stubbornness of a bad joke
that no one remembers telling.
And I still stay for the punchline,
not out of hope,
but because even futility has a texture
I’ve learned to hold without breaking.

If there’s any mercy in this world,
it’s that numbness, too, is a kind of shelter.
And on the days when the abyss leans in
as if to whisper a shortcut,
I answer the only way I know how:
Not today.
I’m busy watching the ruins glow.