“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” ~ Poe

They say my mind has sunk too far below,
That I have crossed where reason fears to tread,
But madness holds me fast in its undertow—
It’s daylight’s logic filling my soul with dread.

In lunacy I wander without weight,
Where shattered hours drift like ash on eaves,
The world unthreads; I fade and dissipate—
And sorrow is a guest who never leaves.

When suddenly the veil snaps, hard and clear,
And I recall each face that I have lost,
A white, unblinking truth pierces through my fear—
I reckon, one by one, each mortal cost.

In lucid hours I sift through years that fray,
The letters left unsent, the vows I broke,
I watch my former self slowly drain away
And mourn him like a name no longer spoke.

Sanity descends like winter’s knife,
Flaying every fiction I have worn;
It reveals what I’ve fashioned of this life—
A man who kneels in silence, raw, forlorn.

So let me slip back through that silver seam,
Where memory bleeds to rain-washed, ghostly grey,
Where I can live inside a kinder dream
And watch the hard, cold world drift away.

They call it sickness, this untethered state,
They minister with tonics and with scorn,
But they will never know the crushing weight
Of waking lucid, shattered, and outworn.

So let me be unraveled, let me go
Into the dark where gentle madness waits,
For those who see too clearly come to know—
That truth bears wounds no mercy can abate.