Dead Keen OR Recovery Position

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

Many if not most of us  have been there at some time or another. Now we’re dead keen to get on with whatever life has in store for us, now we feel it’s all a waste of time... so why bother?

Regular readers will know that I have suffered from depression most of my life. Now and then, readers email me to ask how I deal with it. No easy answer to that as I am not even sure myself. Yes, I do my best to nurture a positive-thinking mindset, but I still find myself confronting The Abyss from time and life forces out of nowhere invariably come to my rescue; how or precisely why, I have no idea, they just do...

Today’s poem attempts to convey the sense of being rescued that has helped me through really bad times; the nights are always the worst, but even now, having to deal with the prostate cancer and other health issues, my friendly shadows see me though even having to get up so many times to pee... and see that I go back to sleep sooner rather than later.

As a child, I used to suffer with earache badly, especially at night. My mother would often recite poems she knew by heart to lull me to sleep. I like to think my friendly shadows are the extensions of those same poems, come to haunt me in the nicest possible way.

Well, that’s a poet for you, fanciful to the nth degree...

DEAD KEEN or RECOVERY POSITION

Sometimes, I feel shadows
on my bedroom wall, closing in on me,
but never menacingly,
as if they know instinctively
I’m in a bad place,
needing to be comforted feel reassured
that it cannot last long (surely?),
an awful, chilling loneliness, descending on me
like a shroud in a mortuary

I start to shiver and shake,
the shroud all but poised to cover my all,
make a cadaver of me...
until the shadows force an entry
into the tiny space
still letting me breathe, admonishing me
for having the gall
to surrender a mind-body-spirit well able to resist
any sense of abyss to the last

Yet, there I sway at the edge
of an abyss, and dare I say I am tempted
to let myself fall,
but for shadows having none of it,
urging without voices,
reciting poems that have a familiar ring,
playing feisty music,
no seductive harp, but pulses of sound to dance to
the whole night through...

Merging into one, the shadows
tear at the shroud as enthusiastically
as I sit up and propel
myself to the floor, a new lease of life
recharging me
as never quite before when they have always
come to my rescue,
these dream shadows, kin to the lively mind-body-spirit
of a depressive poet

Come morning, throwing off the duvet, ready to take on
the world again, dead keen

Copyright R. N. Taber 2022

[Note: Everyone has their own ways of getting to sleep, of course, but counting sheep has never worked for me. A friend, long since passed away, used to imagine his pet tortoises racing each other. He'd often relate how they were so slow that he could always guarantee he'd  nod off to sleep from sheer boredom.... 😀] RT