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.