Sleep Carries A Knife

I distrust sleep.
It is a door that opens inward
to rooms God boarded shut.

The mattress sinks like a confession pit.
I lie down, and the ceiling lowers its teeth.
Something waits in the dark
with my childhood posture.

Night makes a practice of possession.
Every shadow learns my name.
The air grows crowded with unfinished lives,
Their breath wet against my ears.

There are corridors in my skull
that loop without permission.
Their walls sweat old sermons.
Their floors tilt, gently, toward regret.
I walk them with a borrowed spine,
dragging a lamp stitched from fear,
calling for the selves I misplaced
in previous versions of this body.

Some answer by scratching.
Some kneel in corners and rehearse my voice.
One of them wears my face backward.

What I call dreams
are trials without verdict.
The jury wears my face.
The judge has no mouth.

I wake with the taste of prophecy
rotting on my tongue.
Sheets knotted like aftermath.
My pulse pacing the room,
counting exits that do not exist.

Sleep leaves fingerprints on my throat.
Furniture watches me recover.
The clock stutters like a liar caught mid-word.
Every mirror refuses to cooperate.

If hell is repetition,
then sleep is its apprentice.
If heaven requires innocence,
then I am barred at the threshold.

So I linger in the corridor of almost morning,
refusing the key sleep offers.
I would rather haunt myself consciously
than be dragged, blindfolded,
through another forbidden night
where the walls remember me
better than I do.

And still the house inside me molting
hallways suturing shut behind my spine,
candles, learning my name by heart.
I follow a bell made of bone
until it rings from inside my skull.
Every door opens into a mouth.
Every passage ends in me,
mistaken for salvation,
entombed in the last room.