Did I give up in those moments
When the waves crashed over me,
The biting cold gnawed at my ear
And the wind sang songs so sickly sweet,
I thought the world had run out of letters?
Did I throw myself away
Like some discarded, empty wrapper
To forever be abandoned on the roadside
Never decaying, never leaving, until a petty criminal
Picked me up as part of community service?
Did I surrender to an onslaught of criticism
With no physical cause, nobody I could blame
But myself, and my mind, which encouraged
Me to shrink down into obscurity, so often sought
By the stories I never thought good enough to tell?
Somehow, I held on, though many times
I dreamed of the beauty of my non-existence,
The paradise of eternal sleep over life,
And squeezed through the closing doors of promise
That predicted stories worth writing again one day.
Let it come from the heart 
[…] Demise and Rebirth – A mixture of anxiety about life and anxiety about writing, with a glimmer of *gasp* […]
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This is amazingly well written! I think a lot of us can relate to wondering how we nearly gave up in our own individual battles with mental illness. This poem’s optimism is subtle but it is there nonetheless -especially in the last stanza. At least, that’s my interpretation of it anyway! Either way nothing can take away from the fact that this is a great piece of writing – so well done!
Did it take you long to write out of interest?
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Thank you very much. I had the first paragraph and the last line written down for a long time before the whole poem came together – it came together when I tried to write something about feeling uninspired and ended up turning into a metaphor about mental illness.
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