The questions I ask when I feel too sick to sleep again
A poem
Maybe I made myself sick,
as a smoker blackens their lungs.
Maybe I invited it in with deep breaths
held it too long inside until
the poison sunk into every ounce of me.
Maybe my body is keeping score
and I’m coming out as the loser.
Maybe these decades of holding tight
to my own fear, a white-knuckle grip,
let’s just get through
this day this week this month this year this life.
Maybe if I had ever stopped to ask
what I was getting through for
I could wake up each morning
in a body I didn’t want to escape from.
Or maybe not. Maybe the game
was rigged from birth,
my genes lined up in a domino row
waiting to fall, to create a cascade of chaos.
Maybe there was no keeping out
what was here all along.
Maybe this is my inheritance, my birthright.
Passed down from my mother, from my father,
from the generations I can’t touch
but can feel in my body,
this tender, aching thing.
It is asking me:
How did we get here?
And how do we leave?
