Lately I have been spending most of my ‘free’ time 

(for when is time really free?)

resting, sleeping, reading, watching movies, 

lying on the couch or in bed

faint-willed, my heart beating in aberrant 

patterns and rhythms, unmindful of any discipline,

impertinently irregular with alarming regularity.

I see clear sky and cannot go out  into the day;

I want to walk, to move, but I remain paralyzed.

I have been here before. 

This ennui has been here, always,

catching me gracefully like a lithe male dancer; 

I quake in his arms, outwardly listless,

a fallen heroine. 

It is being dead before I am  dead, this,  

hearing my own blood gushing through a still-born heart. 

Even so, volcanic eruptions of unrecognized pathways

spew forth through moments of unwanted imagination.  

In between these caverns, the sharp knife dedicated to longing  

and half-regrets reasserts itself, pointing the way to the break  

that waits to splinter my ship upon a dispassionate altar. 

Now, under the cool, unblinking sheets 

I am  being violated, persecuted, and purified,

though the wracking spasms of my body protest  the assault

that clears the way for release. 

I do not want to live.   I have never wanted to live.

Yet the pale, gray wick of failed vitality 

continues to ignite, sputter, and burn.

These words are not offered  in the throes of desperation,

nor as a plea for mindless sympathy -

Just factical utterances that disturb my long sleep,

adjusting me toward the only true starting point.

My hand grips the pen, blue and gold-tipped;

it reminds me of a petrified civil-war soldier 

unable to flee. I mockishly dictate my course 

while limping over white pages of snow stained with blood:

the stain of too much reality,

the stain of too much personal truth.