High-Functioning Abyss
Running on wreckage, wired for precision.
Three hours of sleep…
four, if the dark is kind.
Nightmares snap the cord.
I dose myself
just enough to pass
for almost normal.
3 AM.
The house is dead quiet.
I mine the void for words,
drag them up dripping
while the world dreams on.
Morning.
Same office, same chair.
Same restless circuitry
that bled poems in the dark
now strips processes bare…
threads dancing in daylight.
They think it strange.
They don’t know
the wiring is cracked,
overclocked,
never off.
The abyss never logs off.
Nightmares feed the verses;
the same black feed
routes the daylight maps.
Substances hold the grid
at the edge of heat.
Eighteen: everything imploded.
The wreckage rewired itself…
raw survival
honed into precision.
Now the planner reads:
three hours sleep,
constant nightmares,
chemical baseline,
pattern recognition
flagged “irregular.”
All of it drawn
from the same deep fault.
The depths work double shifts…
poems by night,
solutions by day.
I function highly
on what should have
ended me.
The abyss
keeps the lights on.
- UpsilonA