What You Confess When You Can't Sleep

Lyrics

Two thousand, two hundred and twelve meters down.
Absolute dark. Absolute quiet.
Just the drip, and my own blood in my ears.
And you. A book, wrapped in oilcloth.

Insomniac Ira. That’s what they called you.
Paid you to sleep under a web of wires.
They measured your REM, your delta waves, your ghosts.
But here, in the cold mud of Veryovkina,
your real sleep study unfolds.
Page after page, the ink never quite dry.
The humidity of the deepest place on earth.

Confession one: a terror of mismatched socks.
Confession four: did I lock the front door in 1998?
Confession nineteen: the unkind thing I said to my mother.
It’s still hanging in the air of her kitchen.
Confession seventy-three: I’m afraid no one will find my body.
You brought every un-dream down here, Ira.
Every thought that hunts in the hours before dawn.

What do you confess when the city is sleeping?
When the clock on the nightstand is the only moon?
What do you confess in the final, quiet dark
when sleep is a country you can’t get back to?
What do you confess when you finally can't sleep?

The team that found this place, Demidov's crew in 2018,
they didn't see you.
They saw limestone, and the shaft they called The Rabbit Hole.
They left their ropes.
You left this.
A testament, heavier than any stone,
at the bottom of the world.

Did you think this was the only place quiet enough
to hold it all?
The one bedroom big enough for your wakefulness?
You brought the noise to the silence.
You brought the fever to the 4-degree air.
You brought the light of the sleepless mind
to the one place on Earth the sun has never touched.

What do you confess when the city is sleeping?
When the clock on the nightstand is the only moon?
What do you confess in the final, quiet dark
when sleep is a country you can’t get back to?
What do you confess when you finally can't sleep?

Did you finally get some rest, Ira?
Down here?