I watch you decimated by two AMs,
Inhaling fire and blackened caffeine,
Eyes bleeding from the glowing screen,
Voice too quiet to hold your scream,

Hunched, face hidden,
Words as bitter as your coffee,
Steaming canteen stinking the room,
Face frantic with approaching doom,

Three hours of sleep and fear run through your veins,
Vanity, insecurity alone to your name,
Your mind is as functioning, scrambled, and scarred,
As the wire-showing frame of your laptop.

Pride and stubbornness strangle smiles,
You haven't seen daylight but you have walked for miles,
Your mind a desert, with view to horizon,
Expansive potential, but desolated.

Powerful, flaming, a nuclear reactor,
Melting your soul off your bones,
Spiritual mutations and intellectual poisoning;
It's cruelty how you excel on the edge of a breakdown.

Chasing a dream stolen from you by your childhood self,
Stretched so tight reaching your muscles are floss,
Disintegrating one by one in the darkness of your bedroom
At three AM and counting.

Furious words biting into those on your side,
Visceral rage boiling vibrant in your blood,
An unpinned grenade rolling at my feet,
A shivering child awaiting a hug,

Floor inches deep in scrap paper,
Fingers bleeding from pen tips and ink,
Back shattered from infinite weight,
As you ask to take another pile on.

Eyes alight with knowledge, blinded with fatigue,
Smile wide with curiosity, cracked as you grieve,
Childlike wonder grown into adult thunder,
Sleep cannot offer a reprieve.

A sneer at anything that isn't yours,
Petty, conceited dismissal,
You tower over all, you must,
Because you feel so small.

Too good to see value in others,
Friends intended for learning and ends,
You cannot bend, you refuse to break,
How much of the inferno can you take?

Imperfection is from the gates of hell,
An A was shown to Tantalus as well,
You cannot rest 'till you scald your soul,
As the clock reads four AM.

Some shining pinacle up ahead
Has seared your eyes and scarred your head,
You're being consumed at a steady pace,
And have elected to speed up the race.

You cannot step back, you cannot stand by,
Every day is scraping past your fingers,
Losing grip, mind sluggish from all the late nights,
Stomach yearning to be filled, just addressed,

Flaying skin with self-loathing,
But none of the strength needed to grow,
Hungry for an ideal reserved for Christ and AIs,
Drowning in the acid rain of ambition,

Lungs boiled into putrid agony,
Hair woven with animal-skin despondency,
Soul aching to prove it deserved to be made,
Hands shaking with caffeine zest and brooding,

Drunk on success and high on failure,
Hooked up to the IV tube of education,
Burned alive in the college pipeline,
Coughing up blood and tears and sixties.

Vision going yellow, not like old paper but like jaundice,
With each equation descending into oblivion,
Headache between eyes as if you're in wartime,
As five AM fast approaches.

And you paint suicidal poems on your lips,
Philosophy and physics in like mustard gas,
Calculus and history a ruptured gall bladder,
Strangling yourself, bruised and broken,

Thrashing to escape your own condemnation,
Chained to a track you have chosen,
Girding armor made of lead; bile frozen,
Brain rotting, shredded into strips,

Moments away from the computer give withdrawal,
Blazing glory when you conquer another night,
Reading books as if you're caught amidst a fight,
Bowing to the void of deep ambition.

Amnesia madman with a grasp on computers,
Abusive loner with a grip on rhetoric,
You've reduced yourself to fibers and whirled wires,
Eating your own visceral desires.

Breaks are crime, you're out of time,
Raging, blazing, caffeine down your throat,
Everyone's afraid to even touch you.
Most of all yourself--you'd fall apart.

This lobotomy of the consciousness is enduring,
Underlying every word or equation you write.
So you bleed and you cry as dawn wakes,
And looks down on you. Another sleepless night.