Beneath the Surface

The heavy shroud begins to settle
before I even lay down. My eyelids,
like ancient, iron-bound doors,
strain against the day's last light,
promising a rest that never truly arrives.
The velvet dark offers no balm,
only a deeper, heavier cessation
that tastes of the tomb.

Then dawn, a pallid, unwelcome guest,
creeps through the grimy panes.
I wake not renewed, but more undone,
as if the night merely deepened the decay.
My bones are cold stones in a forgotten crypt,
my mind a cobwebbed attic,
every thought a laborious lift
from a shadowed, dust-laden corner.

Through work's grim edifice I wander,
a phantom limb in a living crowd.
Each task, a leaden weight
on shoulders already bowed by invisible burdens.
The fluorescent hum, a distant, mocking dirge,
my spirit, a flickering gaslight,
threatening to gutter out
in the chill of endless sameness.

And the after, a hollow echo,
the corridor stretching into further gloom.
The day's performance done,
I shed it like a skin, revealing
only more weariness beneath,
a deeper, inherent exhaustion
that no amount of silence,
no amount of stillness can abate.

But it’s the light, the fleeting joy,
that truly draws the well dry.
After the forced gaiety, the bright, brittle laughter,
the mimicry of happiness—
I am utterly undone.
It’s as if each smile carved a trench,
each shared moment of lightness
drained something vital, something ancient.
The effort to be human, to connect,
leaves me more a ruin than before,
a grand hall stripped of its tapestries,
the air thick with the dust of expended light.
It felt like trying too hard,
a fragile glass facade upholding
a crumbling, inner crypt.

No matter how many hours
I lay entombed in my bed,
the weariness persists, a spectral companion.
It is a bone-deep chill,
a marrow-aching knowledge,
that true rest is a myth,
a whisper in a forgotten tongue.
I am always tired, always falling,
a shadow falling deeper into shadow,
awaiting a final darkness
that might, at last, bring peace.