I'm counting hours like their minutes
My head ticking away the clocks metronome
Floating away into the silence of the predawn
On a sea of shaking nerves
Calmed only by the balm of deep breaths and desperate attempt at misdirection
This irrational dancing beneath my skin attacks in the calmness.

2:43 the flashing of the colon light is burned into my retina
It's digital face I can not forget
The timeless monotony of the ceiling long having lost it's grab for
I stare mostly into the darkness look for an anchor to the numb that is my mind
I banished the silence long ago with the uncomfortable pressure of foam
Trying to kick start my mind liberate it from the listless void it has fallen back into
Stay in
Breathes it's shallow breaths like some sick starving thing
Where anxiety and insomnia meet so strung out
Feeling like the static in a television.

Its one am and Im wet again
Trying to expunge the anxiety that creeps like marching ants
Under the skin against the brain
This energy that is ceaseless
This dragon I slay nightly
Will not stay dead
So I find myself standing underneath the raging spray
Hoping and pleading for it to all go away.

It follows me
Into the room
Into bed
Into the morning
Into every waking aspect of my day
That niggling feeling that wont go away
Setting the teeth to edge
Making the bones hurt
With its edgy, alertness
Like at any moment my mind will freak out
Tumble over the cliff side and explode into a mess of emotion
The problem is I'm not sure what it will be
What triggered it or where that pins and needle restlessness really came from
All I know
Is its here
Intensifying
Until tears well and fall
The madness doesn't stop.

It has become more of a conversation to a listless void
Written in an almost spoken manner
Words seem to tumble out of my mouth and onto a screen
Venting its esoteric nonsense to a muse that is either deaf or unable to respond
It is no longer an attempt to express love in that rhyme dime fashion or to detox in a Poe'tic fashion
It has become my random thoughts screaming out into the abyss hoping for an echo of something that isn't its own voice.

The old maroon fabric feels like the uncomfortable glide of fingers over a velvet poster
That annoying fuzzy feeling that leaves a bad touch after taste
Similar to the feeling of nails against a chalk board wall or the feeling of tiny insect feet crawling in the darkness of a room
The skin raising feeling that lingers
Creating that sudden down turn to the mouth in a way most unattractive but more real than anything portrayed by the movies.

That kind of disgust that can only come from the feeling of true honest to god antique furniture that refuses to modernize.
Putting to shame in that moment any other feeling of discomfort you have had in the last month.
But ****** if it isn't the most comfortable fall into never want to leave piece of furniture you own.
Forcing you both to love and loathe.

I find myself awake in the endless now
Closer to the immediate time of midnight
That stretches in the echoing tick of a second
The true forever of the present

In the gaping maw of an endless moment marching forward
I can't help but wonder how its that we wake into the comprehension that the future is an imaginary concept that is never truly reached.
When between two seconds I have felt the breadth of an eternity
Breathing its hot and uncomfortable decomposition onto my being
Aging,
Tallying away the moments until I am but ash on the pavement

That our only perception of reality can happen in the foreverness of a moment that becomes wistful of itself like some elder trying to relive the fleeting feeling of youth
That the past is only a recollection of the now in its nostalgic bubble
Painted like some old time movie in the cobwebbed section of the brain, that forgets important information
Like where the keys are and instead keeps the bitter burn of being in love for the first time.
The last time.

Its these lanquid seemingly shallow thoughts that keep me from dropping into the blissful chaos of REM
Falling off the face of reality and into the black nothing
My brain digs into conceptual conundrums, when really all I want to do is sleep..