Chest Of Bruises & Battles

My gaze shifted from hither and thither,

Far and wide over every cranny

Of the space around me.

And I saw them, heard them,

Inevitably felt them sans any ease -

The melancholic claws of despondency

Crawling from every one of those crannies

Before enclasping around the base of my throat

While I stared with an ever so known blankness

Right at the voids of an unknown nothingness

That whirled and waltzed in front of me.

And there it was, the weight

Of one or umpteen burdensome hollowness

Soaking up my insides

While the corners of my mind

Entangled and disentangled

With emptying turmoils

Before crumbling bit by bit

With the tints of darkness sprawled all across them

Until the inner hellhounds of that very mind

Ravished and razed each one of them,

Devouring every shard of sanity out of them,

And leaving behind nothing

But the vestiges of sheer bleakness.

My gaze lingered mundanely from here and there,

While this self of mine sank deep and deep

Before immersing wholly in the abyssal pits

Of one perpetually benumbing emptiness

Until that something, the rectangular blank pages

That remained strewn and scattered

Merely a few feet away from me

At last, beckoned me to look at them.

A warmly bitter cry fled through my lips

As I stared at the familiar blankness

Breathing within me etched across

Somewhere else apart from me.

And I saw, my reflection or perhaps

A fraction of it, erupting across those pages

With an abrupt vividness

While my eyes remained adhered

Not to my sunken face

But to my chest upon which

Laid countless scratches and stitches

That still bled with hues of numbness.

The tips of my fingers,

Trailed across the rims of those scars

That peeked through the ragged camisole,

Sneering at me while mocking

So many of those fruitless endeavors of mine

To escape the knots of nothingness

That relentlessly clenched and unclenched

Across this very chest of mine.

And none of these scars of bodily anguish

Had ever diminished the barren anguish

Wrecking every tad of my mind.

My grip seemed to tighten

Across the edges of those pages,

As every bit of me screamed

To crumple them one by one

Before tossing all together across the trashcan.

Yet I couldn't help but halt the moment

Shades of unparallel lambency flashed across them,

And I never knew a blankness such as theirs

Could also hold such an illumination.

"Would this dazzle of the twenty or so pages

Staring at me with an alluring emptiness

Embedded in them,

Be able to gleam its way

Through the hollowing pits of my being?" -

My lips mumbled out loud

While my fingers ceased tracing

The numerous imprints of all kind of bruises

Carved upon my flesh solely by myself

Before ardently seeking bits of solace

As they now commenced tapping out

Words afterwords on the once

Emptily whitewashed pages

With every paint of blue and black.

I gathered the strewn pages,

Placing it on my lap as I held their seamless edges,

With tenderness this time while it tugged at me,

The old and too well known brutally vengeful claws

Of that very despairing nothingness

Pulling me to the verge of fragmenting all over again,

As it hardly forgot to rip my head and heart apart.

And I knew whatsoever that would happen next,

Such as the familiar frowns of angst

Would soon bloom across my temples

As my chest would constrict achingly

With tinctures of dejection all over it

While the cuts and gashes residing upon it

Would once again laugh at me,

And at every futile attempt of mine

To find that one escape from this agony

That ruthlessly raged on through me.

And were we not that escape? -

The pages resting between my hands yelled at me,

That were now a chest, stacked with tons of words

That retained the invincibly invisible battles

That were ceaselessly fought and forfeited

Right inside that skull of mine.

And right then and there,

Something seemed to happen

That I never knew had happened before.

I placed the back of my hands on my chest,

As the ugly knots of unheard and unseen trepidation

Seemed to unbridle as the jagged heaving of it

That throbbed neath the flesh of my palm

Felt to be slowing down with every word

That I inscribed upon temptingly blank pages.

The unkemptly painful pounding of the heart

Between my ribs seemed to thrum

With a rigor lesser than before

With every tale of those uncountable inner conflicts

That I penned down in utmost incoherence.

The breaths of mine that remained hitched

At the base of my throat

As the mighty panic of derealization

Welling up in every inch of my insides

Seemed to weaken its clutches around me

With every brokenly strung prose and poem

Of my vulnerabilities and deadening valor

That made my fingers writhe with an ardency

To only string more and more words together.

The nooks of the mind,

And every bundle of fibers along my spine

That profusely bled with a hopelessness

Seemed to dig out scraps of hope,

Along with a door to redemption

Amidst the words engraved so furiously

Yet soothingly upon the pages.

And that, something

That I had been sickeningly losing

To the hideous hands of my inner demons

And their havoc of dismal

Seemed to seep back slowly but surely

Into the pits of my shredded soul.

And it was that core of my being,

That sought out to reclaim itself

As every bit of my worst of worst

Continued to be inked down on those pages.

There was a bubble of haziness,

One of the dauntingly dreadful kind,

Draped around every limb of mine

As my knuckles continued to turn white

While clutching the pen so tight

Between my numbed fingers.

I knew they hadn't gone away

Neither would they ever go away in the entirety -

The very melancholic claws of despondency,

I could see them coming for me,

To seize me by my barely healed insides

Before wrenching their way dismally

Through the depths of my mind.

But hey, I had found my shield now -

I half-whispered staring at the bare eyne

Of that weightlessly smothering nothingness

That went by the synonym of depression

As I latched onto the blank pages beside me,

As if these were the sole and lone anchors

To a driftingly detached raft just like my soul

And, grabbed them almost in an instant

Before tucking them under my chin,

Right atop my scarred chest

That now stopped bleeding

With the hurtful pangs of numbness

And began to mend every ounce of its flesh

With an anew veneer of hopefulness

Shrouding it from the vicious clutches

Of the demons that still dwelled

Somewhere inside my skull and above my neck

Banging and beating to be freed

But to no avail, for they remained on leash

With the chains of abeyance around them

While I lived holding onto these very pages

That were nothing short of insignificance

But were only a chest of every bruise of mine,

Depicting every other battle of mine

Against the very self of mine,

That once had been so desirous of dissolving

Into every tinge of nothingness.