A Drowning in Sunlight

Scarcely I slept, restless and fitful / Tossed ashore by oneiric tides / Waking, walking, sand in my hair / Blood shivering in the dark I have held my heart in my hands / Tested its sustenance, useless and cold / Crouching among the circle of stones / Flickering stars merely pinpricks of regret Dreaming — the stark and sunlit threshold/Over and over — slipping closer to the door I transmute delirium to substance / Dripping with sweat, cursed and feeble / I cannot recall the form of a tiger / The fragrance of wood, the slickness of deceit I reject, I deny, I lament that which I create / Curling inward, cowering from light/Lurching from idyll again into ruination I drag my raft by night to the current’s edge/Shoreline strewn with glass, like fistfuls of teeth / Cast upon wine-dark seas of time/Over the scuttling things that wreathe the innards of the earth Behold the sum of man, behold the price of rest / One forbidden sight, one familiar sin / To soar into the sun, to crush that which you hold most dear I have felt its breath in my sleeping mouth / A bitter taste I cannot coax or reproduce / Now, dragged into the moaning daylight / I feel it slip forever from my trembling hands For each attempt to produce a form in perfect structure / The more distended and grotesque my progeny / I resign myself to slump at last into the pyre / But with relief, with humility, with terror I am unharmed Steady my hand, light of the morning / Denuder of self, destroyer of all, deposer of kings, diminisher of man.

Submitted by Lake of Tears — Nov 15, 2025