Somnolent

Somnolent.

In the soft descent of lids unto cheeks,

in the body’s yielding to the hush of bone and breath,

I reach for the arms of Morpheus

as one reaches for a grave’s cool earth—

not in despair,

but in aching need.

The night will not have me.

It keeps me pacing like a restless tenant

in a house lined with ghosts,

each corridor echoing with old names,

old loves that never learned how to die.

Insomnia calls me out upon the moors,

where grief roams feral and barefoot,

crying Heathcliff into the wind—

not for him,

but for anyone who will answer.

The heather bends but does not console.

The sky offers only a hard, starless refusal.

I kneel and pray for somnolence,

for the holy fog that blurs the edge of memory,

for the slow baptism of darkness

that unthreads thought from pain.

Let the mind become a wisp,

let the heart forget its own ferocity,

let the soul be lulled into the soft tyranny of dreams.

Tonight I swallow the sanctioned mercy

and ask it to ferry me across the blackened heath—

not to oblivion,

but to a kinder haunting.

Wrap me, Morpheus,

in your gentle, terrible wings.

Let me wander the moors of sleep,

calling no name,

and be answered by silence.

Let me be somnolent.

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