The world feels foggy these days
Bleary and blurry and never
enough sleep or clarity
Like a candle with two wicks
I burn from both ends
Lit aflame, I glow in golds and yellows—Â
I jolt.
Startled awake
Drool on the cusp of my mouth
My heart seizes in my chest
Stuttering in the beats after two or
Three hours of sleep
There’s a beat inside my head
A pitter-patter against my skull
It pulses and pounds like rain against glass
I can’t sleep.
I’m asleep.
My eyelids feel too heavy
My chest feels too tight
There’s cotton in my head
…
Here I fall asleep.
Here the candle melts.
Wax pools into oil
The world is lit aflame
Blurry and bleary and
Buried in its afterglow
As a senior who is applying to colleges, academics and extracurriculars have felt incredibly overwhelming lately. I’ve been sleeping late and waking up early— – burning the candle at both ends, so to speak. Some days the lack of sleep is palpable. I can feel it in the heaviness of my eyelids and the thrum of a heartbeat in my skull. I wanted to write a poem that illustrates this.