Depression
by Sarah Litchney
All these structures fall in repression.
I am depressed and on this canvas I write on.
I attempt to make dazzling pictures with majestic peacocks and screaming sirens,
but only see the machinery of decaying forest.
You can have that part of me you desire,
all eight legs and venomous fangs,
with crawling silence of my footsteps,
I bite off heads and sliver in my solitude.
St. John was offered on this silver platter.
He made what was mortal some plea to the gods,
but I take head without offering any comfort.
I have no will to be compassionate.
The mind becomes a stretch of mute blackness.
The body is the vessel of torment.
I pull out each eyelash and grind them against my dry skin.
I seek the companionship of abandonment.
So clear a liar to myself and my other selves,
I close my eyes in hope of night.
No one to stop the circulation,
of rights and wrongs and ailments of blight.
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Sarah Litchney is a student studying Creative Writing and English at Southern New Hampshire University. She has been published in a college literary journal twice for her poetry, and she won a national poetry contest when she was ten in middle school. She currently pole dances and Olympic weight lifts in her free time, and she loves dancing salsa with her Hispanic family on the weekends.