The Next Night

Here's my attempt to follow the trend of the contemporary American poetry, which I hear at least in amateur circles.


In times like this,
when you wake up to the dark
and the howling wind feels
like it's going to blow the earth away,
with trees bending
and stop lights swinging
and the window screeching -
abandoned and scared, you are ready to give up.
The darkest thoughts creep into your mind,
you choke in tears,
you toss and turn,
exhausted from trying to break
out of the circle of despair.
You think of your past and see it
as a chain of failures,
and you look into your future through the lens
of your own cruel and unforgiving realization
of self-deficiency.
Your eyes are red and swollen
from the many sleepless nights,
which are blended together
in one endless blurred nightmare.
You get out of bed
feeling the burden of life on your shoulders
and you walk around bent,
unable to straighten up.
You wish you could scream,
roll
and scratch the floor
but you're quiet and submissive.
You accept
the abandonment and the dark,
the wind and the fear,
the past and the future,
and you carry on
through another night.
Eventually
the light will appear,
first barely
then stronger and brighter,
the horizon will become red and bubbly
in anticipation
of the rising sun,
and you will know you've made it,
ready to face the day yet again.
And so you sit in the dark
and wait for that moment -
the moment when you will check mark one more survived night
on your suicidal calendar,
hoping it'll make you survive
the next.