Blur these Edges

Survival in the prison of my body:

this bed my altar,

sleep my sacrifice,

eyes aching one of three ways,

but if we’re being honest the third is just an intersection of the other two,

tears plus sleeplessness featuring dull ache, day twenty three.

—

Survival in the prison of my body:

a mind goes merry around,

arriving at the end early,

glimmers of a hallway of ghostly footsteps,

this is how it ends, isn’t it,

walking where spirits walk, telling yourself you are alive because you fit no phantom shoes.

—

Survival in the prison of my body:

this day the medicine is busyness,

that day the cure is characters in a cartoon,

tonight there is no medicine, no cure,

just a dull ache twenty three nights throbbing,

tears and sleeplessness acting only witnesses.

—

awake in the prison of my body:

if you stifle the symptoms, the sickness lingers.

I couldn’t tell you I caught a virus without lying,

I could tell you what it feels like, bleeds like,

cut ice in the place of a heart,

but mere shadows and blurred edges leave so much to imagine

in reality’s ice-cut, etched-in edges.

—

Asleep in the prison of my body,

I leave the optimistic realists behind,

the pessimistic idealists,

I am both things at once in my sleep,

freed,

forever bound,

—

the prison of my body does not have edges

as a skin does,

at the altar of dreaded dreams

I beg for mere mercy

freed,

forever bound,

—

survival in the prison of my body, step one,

I use real ice to play with glimmering light,

I use actual words to write both true things in my dreams;

I am awake, I am asleep,

this sleeplessness shouldn’t need medicine as much as the aching does

but if I could explain it to you the edges wouldn’t ghost about as inexplicable shadows.