Stillness Unrelenting.

A poem on deep depression, numbness, and powerlessness.

Written originally as a part of a collaborative work no longer available on Substack. Inspired by my own mental health struggles.

Thanks for reading.

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Poem text.

Still’s the water. Still’s the water flow.
Within the quiet of my cradle,
nowhere do these boundless currents go.
My spirit’s kept in this prenatal
world I must escape but can’t forgo
unless uprooted with a ladle.
Yet to be reborn and yet to grow,
the stillness holds me, bleak and fatal.

Empty landscapes, drenched in gray by mist,
surround me from an endless distance—
futures only rumored to exist
in dreams become an incoherence.
Places which I always will have missed
despite my effort and persistence,
caught in seas unshaken by my fist
and thus immune to perseverance.

Still’s my temper. Still’s the heart I bear—
dispassionate, unmoved, defeated.
Nothing that I do may take me where
the waters flow towards a meaning—
if my body lacks the will to spare.
My strength is simply too depleted,
too devoid of life to get me there,
without a course to lead my leaning.

Some would find a paradise to bless
in such a state of self-immersion,
but, despite remaining motionless,
it’s not at all a meditation—
not when all my efforts soon regress
within this infinite aversion.
When it’s not by choice that I repress
my sorrows, this is tribulation.

Still’s the torture. Still’s the quiet roar
that rises from within. Tormented.
In the womb of all I can’t outpour,
I linger in this mute lamenting.
Here, what’s after blends with all before,
in cycles turning me demented.
All I have’s the water; nothing more
than stillness—stillness unrelenting.

The Calm Sea by Gustave Courbet, via Wikimedia Commons.