To Be So Heavy/Heavy In One's Mind Poem by Shalom Freedman

To lay down
To be unable to move
To be heavy so heavy
In one's mind
To know one cannot move
To feel it is all over
To believe one has wasted one's life
And failed everyone one cares about
To have let down the world
That doesn't care anyway
And then
To try to resist
To force oneself to move
To tell oneself it is wrong to give up
To begin somehow to try and think in some other way
To tell oneself to have a bit of courage
To not let everyone down
To maintain one's way
To not let anyone know
To remind oneself
That one may have done something after all
With one's life- even if small
To begin to try to write
As if one were really doing something.