As I sit here contemplating this poem,
a few too many things clamor for my mind.
It’s the end of another long workday
and I don’t want to give anything else the time.
Sleep is looking mighty damn fine as a way
to bring down another routine tomorrow
but I put it off for an additional hour or so for why,
why do I run myself into another sorrow?

Mental health awareness.

I heard those three words every day
throughout the month of May
(the ‘awareness’ month) and I wonder
do we listen to what we say?
Do we even know what it means
to keep an eye out for signs
when the first glimmer of trouble
sends us hiding, closing all the blinds?

Mental health awareness.

What happens when what you love turns noxious,
when a healthy challenge becomees an obstacle?
I’m tired of always putting up a fight, I just long
to throw in the towel and declare today impossible.
What happens when the written word
no longer satisfies the breaking heart,
when pen and paper just aren’t enough anymore
so why even try to start?

Mental health awareness.

I’m always watching for the signs in others,
but do I pay enough attention to myself?
Like the sun in the sky, ever beaming outwards,
how often do I check if I am well?
This desire to do good is like loose cargo
in a ship battered by storm-thrown waves,
my balance is off from a fundamental shift
of emotion, of spirit, away from anything that saves.

Mental health awareness.

Digging deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper
mining every strain of me for the next improbable story,
because law of averages assumes good will happen, right?
Maybe God won’t always ignore me?
And I don’t know if there’s anything left to find
and maybe that’s the point.
There is rarely just one solitary avenue
to keeping mind and happiness conjoined.

Because mental health awareness

is the responsibility to recognize when
maybe you yourself can no longer do this alone.
There’s no subsititute for a human connection
as sharing a secret, to me, has shown.
Where written word fails, speak it. Crescendo.
Sometimes you need to draw in the power of another soul. 
May God bless those who have held me in recent nights
for darkness should never swallow any of us whole.