Insomnia

What do you see when you close your eyes?

Me, I see boulders stacked to the sky.

I rip and I pull, “take it down, take it down,”

but they fall on my chest and they drive me to ground.

They hurry me under the weight of the stone,

bury my breath till I’m not my own.

I try to get up, but I can’t, I’m stuck,

covered in rubble and choking dust.

I close my eyes to sleep at night,

but sleep won’t come because 

the visions fight.

Images open inside my mind,

sometimes color, sometimes light.

But sometimes it’s people, sometimes demons,

faces that whisper, cruel and unkind,

and I lie there awake in the dark of my room

with a battlefield built behind my eyes.

Am I crazy? I must be crazy to see what I do.

I question my mind and what these things allude.

My brain never shuts off, the colors won’t stop,

the images rise till my eyelids pop.

I question my life and the things that I see,

was I beaten so badly they live inside me?

Did pain carve a doorway deep in my head

where the past still speaks what my mouth never said?

Before sleep.

At church.

In the glow round a face.

In the hues that spill off people I pass in a space.

Is it madness? A fracture? A mind torn apart?

Or a language of heaven etched into my heart?

Tonight I saw a wall of rock,

big and small and tall and tan,

and there was me with a trembling soul,

sticking out my hand.

I reached to pull just one stone free,

to tear it down, to finally see,

but mountains answered my small demand

and buried me where I stand.

It was my wake-up call in the night,

not a sound, but a crushing truth.

Some walls are built of all I’ve survived,

all the fear I never loosed.

I don’t chase the words, truly they chase me,

pouring from visions I cannot flee.

I cannot rest, I cannot sleep,

till every line is spilled in ink.

In waking or sleep He opens my eyes

to what my soul can’t say,

and the words arrive when the image is set,

like light breaking into clay.

Maybe I sound like a madman, riddled in fire,

talking in colors, walking on wire,

but what if the chaos I wrestle each day

is a genius of grace learning how to obey?

So I’ll take these visions, sharp and untamed,

and lay them like loaves in His hands,

for the kingdom to use what I barely understand,

what was crushed to become what He planned.

I may never know why I see what I see,

why heaven and rubble both live in me,

but I’m learning the gift doesn’t come with full sight

just enough light to walk through the night.

And one day the stones will no longer remain,

no wall, no dust, and no chain.

Only the art of a God who made beauty from pain,

and called my seeing holy, not insane.