The Sleeper

The Sleeper

A cumbersome block of lead--
I carried it in the thing that
some obnoxious self-righteous preacher
called my soul.
A shortage of serotonin--
it was called by some doctor
with a clipboard and some
unacknowledged financial goal.
Even some people (my family),
hovering in the blurry periphery of my existence,
let out some useless tumbling words.

Among the shadowy things
of which I was not consciously aware,
lingered the the reek
of dizzying relentless despair.

I will try my best to tell you
about a day in the life of one
with this sickness of the mind.

At the budding of the day,
I lost all sense of the refracted pasts
when I had no weight to bear.

A drumbeat pounded through my breath
topped by a screaming treble riff-
here is all that I recall:

The warbler warbled
from a branch on a snag on a hill.
While the dawn yawned from the east,
the birdsong burst
through my sleeping will.

While the golden day loomed,
gloomy, over my rest,
the feather-puffs trilled
like the fathers and mothers
who claim to know best.

Forgive my unfiltered deliberations.
I experience these memories,
through closed eyes,
with a bizarre fuzzy vividness.
Anyway...
the blundering tune:

The night's pitch
languished in my whitened shell.
The dead do not rise
and I was not alive,
not as far as anyone
could tell.

In the brightening sky
the small singers flew free.
I told myself it was time to rest
but those tiny brats sang
'We disagree! We disagree!'

I groaned sideways
in my soft tomb
and whispered into myself
'The birds are not right.
'The birds are not right.
I will sink away peacefully
because the birds...
they can't be right...

After that there isn't much to tell...
there I rotted until after the darkness came.
The birds fell silent when the sun sank away
and still, fermenting in my juices, I lay.

Understand that when the glow
seems a black hole,
the sleeper is haunted.
On that day the free-flyers chimed,
and the sleeper,
the sleeper, sleeper...
and the sleeper was nobody...
but the sleeper was me.

  This is supposed to be a poem about depression. More specifically, its supposed to be a bit of a sardonic jab at how irrational one can be when depressed. (Consider it an attack on the illness, not the person.)
  With the first few draft of this, it became obvious that my message was too understated. I've made some edits to this since, in hopes of making my intentions more clear. Have I succeeded? Have I overcompensated? Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!