A Name for the Nameless

You flinch from wakefulness, and you ache for sleep.

You slip from the arms of the waking world into sleep as if into sanctuary—

and then, startled by the seduction of waking,

you tear yourself from sleep’s embrace and run again.

Your days keep passing, quietly, relentlessly,

and you no longer know

whether you have lived them in dreaming

or merely survived them in the harsh light of being awake.

What breaks you more—

the life that feels like a nightmare,

or the sweetness that sleep drips onto your tongue?

When you wake from the nightmare, are you rescued—

or are you only delivered

into the bitterer truth of consciousness?

You know nothing.

You don’t want to know.

Years have gone by, and you have made peace with neither.

Not with sleep.

Not with wakefulness.

For years you have been held by neither the arms of sleep

nor the clear, steady hands of awareness.

For years, you have been foreign to yourself.

Did you ever exist?

Were you ever truly shaped—

or were you, from the beginning,

a distortion the years sculpted without mercy?

A form that is not a rectangle,

not a triangle,

not a circle—

a nameless geometry,

a figure with no lineage, no rule, no home.

Just like you.

Formless.

Unheld.

Unmade.

Unfound.

On the surface you resemble order,

as though you were assembled from neat angles and familiar lines—

but inside you, every formlessness

dances to its own wild instrument.

It drags you—this way, then that—

until motion becomes exhaustion

and exhaustion becomes stillness.

You become still,

and you guard the pillar of silence

as though silence were the last thing

that cannot abandon you.

Your words feed on your words,

circle each other like moths around a dim flame,

and finally you choose the quiet.

And in choosing quiet,

you become less defined each day—

edges dissolving,

corners softening,

names slipping away.

You do not come back to yourself—

because there is no self waiting.

You have no “you.”

You do not exist.

Perhaps you never did.

Dazed and swaying, you go searching for meaning,

but your measure is missing:

no area, no perimeter, no boundary—

nothing that can be drawn and called real.

You did not exist.

You do not exist.

You will not exist.

In wakefulness you beg for sleep,

and in sleep you sing a dirge for wakefulness—

like a rooster crying out in the middle of night

at the smallest betrayal of light,

like a broken wind-up clock

that insists on ticking its hollow song:

without meaning, without purpose,

you sing,

you dance,

you remain—

and still, you know you are not.

You know—

with the sharpest certainty you possess—

that you know nothing.

You are, yet you are not.

You are not, yet you are.