Neurosis
I am dark matter, white noise.
I can’t fall asleep
in midnight’s unrelenting
stillness.
The quiet makes
everyone and everything outside
disappear and
I feel alone.
I don’t know how to be alone
without losing my self.
Anxiety sets in
like mist.
I evade shadows,
lose focus as the sun
rises and
sets.
Some days,
I can’t keep up.
I need to breathe
but I can’t.
I am trapped
on this blue planet,
silently spinning
through space.
The world I was born into was
a muted scream made audible
in the emergency exit
of my mother’s belly.
I have made 20 revolutions
around a sun
I cannot control,
a cycling of
waves, planets, bicycles, periods,
This noisy rhythm is dull
against my
heartbeat.
The compression of blood
in and out of ventricles
in and out of veins,
out of me:
like the ocean
washing the beach
after footprints litter
its pristine shoreline;
like the final squeeze
of catsup before it reaches
its sputtering and anticlimactic
finish;
like you
sighing, begging me
to stop being
so neurotic.
Each year, a twister
that sweeps me off my feet
day after day, but I always find
my way home.
I don’t know where home is,
not anymore,
but being here with you
seems right.
The snow is silent as dots
falling from the darkness
of the heavens
onto spindly trees
The world is quiet here,
except the wind
on the window pane,
and you beside me.
You hold my hand,
our body heat colliding
in the darkness and
I can’t let go.
Jocelyn Mosman is a junior at Mount Holyoke College, but will be studying at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK this fall. She is a member of the Northampton Poetry Slam Team to compete at the National Poetry Slam in Oakland this August. She has previously published two volumes of poetry and is currently working on her third.
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