Poetry, February 2021.

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I say I am tired when I am encumbered;
All consumed by debts and doubts,
At max capacity and doubled booked,
with double shifts and Zoom fatigue
or menstrual cramps on the first day
Of a new job, in a new world, in a new life
That’s getting shorter all the time.

I say I am tired when I don’t know how to tell you
That there are daggers in my stomach
Carving runes and ancient ramblings of
Anxieties long passed, resurfaced and
eroded by the acid I’ve spent two decades
 swallowing down, diluted with my coffee.

I say I am tired when I am breathless from chasing my dreams
down road after road after road after road after road
in fragile hopes that another dead end isn’t waiting there.
My lungs are burning from the from the effort, and
my eyes are glazed by the wind and the scrolling and the numbers
climbing around me while you tell me that they don’t matter
but they do matter
because they matter to me
and I want to matter, too.

I say I am tired when I am tired of feeling like
I’m getting left behind too early and like,
just because I’m thirty, I am running out of time.
And I’m so fucking tired of grinning and bearing;
all the smiles do is hurt my teeth that I am
 grinding into pebbles and dust every time I go to sleep.

I am tired of being tired because rest has reinvented itself
as a luxury, not an option for the ten thousand versions of me
feeling bigger than the body I’ve been
sentenced to die in, and in my coffin, I am certain
I’ll take with me every moment of envy,
longing and loneliness written off as ‘tired’
to Hell.