Soliloquy

What starts no more than a gentle trickle
leads to things often left unnoticed.
Sleep is the biggest casualty in this battle,
with footnotes on the subject of desire.
Young again in the advent of the morning,
replenished enough to go soul-searching…

Servitude seeps into the mind with
groundless thoughts running amok
in the sensitive fields of cascading lucidity.
You’re often the last man standing,
and love is too weak a word to have
kept you unsated in this tug of war.

We have both reached a kind of succour
that the years can claim to have created.
I am therefore unjaded and jaundiced
to such an extent as to know
that the universe has claimed this as a win.
We’re not there yet, and I can’t give you up.

Weathered by the storms of defeat,
beaten in its tracks by forlorn longing.
Defeated by the indecencies of destiny,
encouraged by victories over time.
Inured by rebuffs across the years,
accumulating the drug named hope.