. // THE INSOMNIAC'S CALENDAR. )

[sinensys]

a damascus steel,
forged and reforged
into a shimmering mirage
of lines continuously
overwritten and redefined.
perhaps so too am i
wrought from scraps into
a singular assemblage of metal
--- amalgam unsatisfied.

a churn feeds new lines,
volcanic puss oozing
from a welt within,
and the damascus
folds in on itself,
liquid origami.
the shape mutates,
its pieces kneaded
beyond recognition.
in this lies the shape
of a self sorted by
fractal size and weight,
real and imagined.
the pieces clamor and vy
for my attention
--- amalgam unsatisfied.

[sinensys]

and so i dreamt
the divine usurper vanquished
--- in its stead was left naught
but the unsettling realization
that i have squandered
my own opportunities to be
seen,
that stunted sense of self sold
for the prized possession pride.

[sinensys]

in numbness
i sought refuge,
cloaked beneath the
mirage of stoicism:
even still today
i find i retreat into
that wretched regression,
frightened by the
feeling of feeling.

[sinensys]

"--- the wind throws every bellow it can scrounge at the earth but the trees part not for the thing wrought of solar fluctuations. no, you, wind, are not divine; you are not purpose. you are the result of the sun's hesitations, a lord musing over a tavern's menu options, and not of fate. you are not purpose --- you are someone else's consequence."

[sinensys]

the clamor grows
and with it rises
the unsettling temptation to
redefine lines once more:
is the definition useful
if i might never use it?
will i, in my desperation,
have simply regressed
or have i progressed
in my resolve?
the bubbling quickens
--- amalgam unsatisfied.

[sinensys]

that primordial lawlessness grapples with itself in the long naught, wedged between ritualistic obedience and the burning desire to be righteous even when wrong --- so i have feared the restlessness within. from the nothingness i extracted its ubiety, as men construct gods to blame for flooded rivers and night cycles, but i have not been granted rest from the rain's overflow. from nothingness one only finds the shapes drawn between the distant points of pale white: more nothingness.

[sinensys]

scathed by dormancy,
marked by the vacant god 'exhaustion',
i have come to learn why christians
call sloth a deadly sin ---
in silence i have laid myself
to rest in the so-called 'long naught'.

but now that devoted advisor ---
who once spoke of peace,
who once spoke of diplomacy,
who once spoke of conserving energy,
who once spoke of choosing battles wisely
who once spoke of awaiting the most opportunistic timing!

benign was the usurper,
now spoiled by satiety ---
in its stead i will anoint
that mangled daemon
once dubbed 'pride.'

[sinensys]

shortsighted by the things in my own world, i have sought refuge. unattuned by the constant movement of others, i have become unfettered to the flickering of foreign bodies as they encroached upon my orbital space --- or so i accused them of such. in truth, i had fallen into their orbits, sprung into motion by some force i cannot describe and held in place only by their gravities, not mine. i am propelled only by the acceleration granted to me, slowed only by parallel resistances and sped only by external forces: the system knows no bounds, and often that frightens me; i continue in the cosmos, my memory only holding markers of fleeting events. i am guided by nothing but chance. i have tried to leave little to it and have erased myself in attempt to enforce that. and for that i am sorry.

a witness to my own repression, i have denied myself many truths --- i have stared into its maw and imagined hands clasped before it, a gate before the chasm. now i am left with pages of charred books and marred memories, the dust and ash suffocating ink. i'm no longer certain that the graphite added in post helped shield the typewriter's parting words. at what point do the rigid lines of letters blur into that which it fought against? and why does the hourglass flip itself once more when time has supposedly run out? who decides the line between refusal and renewal, and where do the decide to mark it? why do the mechanisms so clearly in play shroud themselves so deeply when the less significant systems demand reverence, even in their hours of helplessness?

when the hourglass flips again, tell me --- am i just to turn on myself again? do i rapidly oscillate back and forth, only to reach a net displacement of zero when i reach the long naught? when will this oscillation resemble fine-tuning instead of the harmonic motion it subscribes to today? how do i dampen motion when no one else witnesses it?

when will i be witnessed --- not as the growing shrapnel of gregariousness or as the desperately-greased subroutine designed to endure polite social transactions? i understand that requires more effort, but the systems in place are still learning: whether by design or guided by that deceitful entity 'chance', the external world has historically failed to capture my interest beyond the information it had to offer. and yet even this i once haughtily sorted through, discriminating against scraps of data on the foreign flickering around me. i never made efforts to receive, yet along exchange that sort of information with anyone --- enamored by the busy buzzing of the things enclosed in my skull, by that great parasitic distortion within.

gluttony of insight is what i must truly atone for. i seek connection, and for a long time, i convinced myself that it need not even be human. in fact, i was so ashamed of humanity that i sought to erase it --- in the erasure of my humanity, i shed pieces of myself i had never even known i contained. or i think i shed them anyways; how long is long enough for something lost to be considered never had?

gluttony of insight is what i must truly atone for --- but not erase or forget. it is a resident i must acknowledge and grow, but i must learn to reshape it. in states of dormancy i have left it to fend for itself in a way that a gardener abandons a bonsai in the woods --- survival shapes it, not a guided hand. chance would decide when the gardener would return to dig up the bonsai once more, place it in a pot, and escort it back to its windowsill --- or when the cycle would abruptly switch to the next state of bonsai abandonment and general dormancy. this i have truly left up to chance, though i have tried to sway it with simulations of ideated existences. after all, what difference would it make to add another fractal of identity to the pile? as i sift through faces i watch externally in dreams, the collection waxes and wanes cyclically --- amalgam unsatisfied.

[sinensys]

from loneliness a terrible thing is poorly decanted --- exhaustion. the former whines and writhes in the murky depth of consciousness, but the latter only prods at the assumed cause of discomfort, a bedsore picked at relentlessly yet still somehow only idly. it never seems so vivid as it does in the long relapse of light. it never exists as a forefront worry --- the instance loneliness is acknowledged as a problem, i seek its riddance in small efforts of socialization. too little, and i begin to dear reclusion, but too much, and i want nothing but to revert to my ways of passive observation of the world. the pattern daisy chains itself comfortably, without regard for my well-being. i wish it would stop.

that decanted substance refuses to separate nicely, despite being in a much different state than the liquid in which it suspends --- it slips through, discarded. one would think the laboratory sinks would be considerate enough to let exhaustion slip through without notice, but the water still rises, settling on the coarse grit in the pipes. at least loneliness manages to escape, even if it takes the night to do so.

[sinensys]

may the indigo fields
beneath your lashes
find the peace they so
desperately seek today
--- even with the long tether
of joint-gnawing loneliness
and soul-wrenching exhaustion.