A rework of an oldie and a submission for Desperate Poets OLW
dreaming into that dark
night of stitched-lip-screams
a great yawped boom
of silence so infinite
it crushed me wholly
an infinitesimal smallness
failing legs at the crossroads
as ghost traffic hurtled death
my way
roused and drenched in sweat
stitch-less now
yet screaming silently
un-rescue-able heaviness
in the void of what it is
to be a(wake)
Paul Scribbles 
So many nights I sleep well but wake with a bleak black heaviness. I shake it off soon enough with my daily purposings (vastly here) but I’m surprised how much despair still resides in the night of dark self. Though the conscious life has an arc toward wholeness (or improving takes on it), the dark is still greatly riddled, stitched and screaming. Your poem is so heavy with these strange numens. Sign of the times? Our aging? Go figure.
The poem mostly addresses a recurring nightmare in my youth, thankfully it visits me no more. I sleep well these days but there is a remnant of the night present for me too upon waking. As with you, writing seems to blow off cobwebs.
My past seems to accumulate in dreams — regret, loss, grief titrate into a precipitate of splines, zodiac twists and turns, ladders of bones.
Accumulation — yeah, that makes sense … no wonder it feels ever heavier waking up.
The fabric of nightmare is all over this, immediate, heavy, sitting on the chest to take the breath. Very vivid and real. I have only had recurring dreams a few times, and they are an insistent, living presence. You bring that to life here.
Thanks. Happy to hear that I got some of that feeling across.
This sounds like waking to a kind of hell, a heavy hell that absorbs all sound. *shiver*
–Shay
It was exactly that and too much for my young mind to manage.
Stitched-lip-screams brings me immediately to that dream space of panic. Desperately trying to scream and only coming up with silence which only deepens the threat. The poem makes me glad that it’s been a long time since I’ve suffered nightmares. A long time, nevertheless, the poem managed to awaken a fear. Harmless enough (perhaps)… but there.
Tis long long since I experienced these and I have no fear of a return, even after dredging up the memories.