Most people know the cartoon hypnotist: a pocket watch swinging on its chain, a soothing voice, a victim whose eyelids droop. In "Conscious," LaKeisha borrows that picture and stretches it into a larger claim about pressure to switch off. Her speaker stands in "a detrimental space," a place where people "lie / and try to save face" and expect her to "acquiesce." What they want from her is quiet. She should "ignore my senses," "shut out consciousness," "negate focus." The poem's answer is stubborn and simple: her eye "never rests" and "never closes." Staying awake is the whole stance.
The cleverest move is the pun on "eye" and "I." The word is spelled as the organ but plainly stands in for the self, so watchfulness and identity become one thing. The grammar seems to follow this. Early on, the verbs take the third-person -s ("eye never rests," "eye never closes"), as if the eye were a separate object being observed. In the last stanza the s disappears: "eye never rest." The verb now matches "I," and I read this as the eye and the speaker finally merging. Even the odd phrase "gauge my odd eye" works on two levels. Hearing "gauge" as "gouge" gives an attempt to put out her vision, while "odd eye" doubles as "odd I," the person who doesn't fit the room's expectations.
There is no fixed meter or rhyme scheme. The lines are short and uneven, held together by echo instead. "Space" and "face" chime in the opening lines, and "lie" and "eye" keep returning like a refrain. "Watches" and "couches" nearly rhyme, and "closes" and "hypnosis" do the same. The poem is also thick with soft s-sounds: "senses," "consciousness," "focus," "hypnosis," "cushions." That hiss is lulling, which is a nice irony, since the poem sounds a little hypnotic while it refuses to be hypnotized. It reads like something meant to be spoken aloud, though that is my impression from its sound patterns.
The opening stanza is one long, breathless sentence, piling up infinitives ("to shut out," "to negate") the way demands pile up on a person. It never settles into a tidy ending, either. It trails into the fragment "Of the ones only interested in the type of change / found in the cushions." Against this sprawl, the final stanza is tight: three short lines, no wasted words.
That change in the cushions is the poem's sharpest image. The people on the couches are "patrons," a word that suggests customers, so the scene feels like a transaction as much as a therapy session. They are "unexpecting," not on guard, while the swingers of watches look for loose coins. "Change" then splits in two. There is the pocket change they scavenge, and "the type that brings peace into fruition," which they are "restricting." Fruition is a growing word, a harvest word, and it makes real change sound like something that needs room and time. The hypnotists keep people still, and stillness protects small profit while starving the larger kind of change.
The ending reworks the opening. "Where they'll lie" becomes "I may lie." The word can mean to deceive, or to recline, as on a couch, and the poem lets both meanings sit there. The concession is quietly honest: the speaker admits she may bend, play along, or even lie down, but "eye never rest." Awareness is not a pose she holds only when it's easy. It continues underneath the compromises.
That is what makes "Conscious" worth reading. It treats consciousness as constant work, something kept up against a pull to doze, rather than a trophy someone wins once. It also does this in very little space. Spelling and sound carry as much meaning as the statements do, and one small shift in a verb shows a speaker becoming the thing she describes.