As sheets rest over my skin like the dirt above a cold coffin, sleep doesn’t call my name like you do. It doesn’t wrap me in its arms until warmth bleeds into my body like a ritualistic lullaby. When I close my eyes, I’m not met with hums of balmy breaths like anesthetic careening me into dreams of you. But, instead I gaze upon the stars in my mind, flipping them over like a lucky coin where a well of sleeplessness hopes for a wish of rest. And until the constellations of my mind flicker and burn out from exhaustion, I’ll kneel like a starved beggar before this well beside dawn painting the horizon. Until the bags under my eyes are darker than the curtains of my eyelids that dangle sleep too far from me.
My head now hits my pillow again for the fifth time this minute, readjusting until I find an inch of fabric where sleep will shackle me in the shadows of my bed. Where chains will finally drag me into rest without you holding the key to my locked lips of forfeited lucidity. My eyelids seal against the bite of exhaustion where that well of darkness is ever only met with a colder stare of lonely oblivion, for my dreams dare to rot without you. And behind the closed seams of my eyes, it’s like walking through the dark, stepping in puddles of mirrored moments. Splashes of sinful songs and serenities that my steps sound through. And then it’s like throwing a stone into the deepest well, waiting for it to hit rock bottom…for the stone to splash the screen of replays and shatter them into nothing but sparks to ignite a replacement lull of bleeding warmth. Maybe it’s like waiting for that heavy collection of stardust to fall into the well of lost luck and seal me into that coffin of nightmares.
And in my bed repellant of sleep, I lie here twisting a broken key to clouded locks of heavenly rest, reaching my arms across the vacant sheets for a lock that is nothing but a metaphor only your breaths can undo. My hands run themselves through the pockets of air, both warm and cold. Surely, running a phantom grasp through where the few and far between familiarities might be.
And then a splash sounds. Possibly the weight of stardust that finally hit rock bottom. But likely the key you threw from your lips of rotted desires of me.
And then the final toss of cold, cold, dirt cradles my body in nightmares breathing that blackness which people say kill dreams. Goodnight.