Sleepless Nights
By Samyuktha Reddy
This is a poem about how the lonely haunting nights become ones best friend.
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Sleepless nights, nights that don't let sleep
enter
But gracefully welcome old thoughts and
memories
that I buried six feet deep under my skin.
Or so I thought I did.
She brings along with her stomach churning
shames of my past,
the sadistic moon washing their feet which
gleams with bright smiles at this rapid
heartbeat,
with, too much, satisfaction.
Pop culture horror taught me
to lock my cupboard lest skeletons should
creep out
turning the knob from within,
while I lay sweating
under my blanket in forty degree heat.
But these demons now, their faces are hidden
not from behind cupboards anymore,
but they laugh, they snicker,
slowly not sudden,
from the grooves of my brain they slither
onto my sheets of linen,
where I writhe.
Feeling so weak.
These sleepless nights throw a bulb over my
laptop
lying half asleep among the mess
on the other side of my king sized bed,
where I lay in alone.
Wild imagination in a satin dress,
used to tuck in uninvited fragments
of my sinful memory, making these nights not only sleepless,
but leaving me dreamless and hopeless and
not fearless
but
breathless.
The letters on my laptop
are my morning cups of coffee and evenings
chai.
Vexatious loose ends of my mind drown in
broken grammar and unstructured sentences.
It is more poetic though,
Isn't it?
These sleepless nights turn into sleepless days,
my garden is clipped off of her thorns
it's beauty- it darkens,
tulips and sunflowers grow always,
it is every season.
These new sleepless nights,
cradle me now,
they wrap me in blankets, they feed me,
its own daughter.
From skeletons in her cupboard and poison in
her head,
to flowers and sunshine rolling in her bed,
she grows.
She grows under the same blanket, next to the
same cupboard, under the same lightless
ceiling,
she grows.
Her leaves etch words in her notebook,
so anchored,
she grows.
She grows upwards and outwards,
and snatches the smirk from the moon,
reclaiming it now. It rests on her face.
She smiles.
Because now, she is blessed.