Most poems about unease give it a cause: a loss, a quarrel, a lonely city at night. Logan Brosemer's "Stillness" gives it none. The trouble arrives as "a small surge in your chest," and the poem never says where it comes from. That silence is the point. The speaker's distress has no source to fix, so it follows them everywhere, and the poem's central idea is that the quiet at the end is not peace but the absence of feeling.
The voice is conversational. "Do you ever get that feeling" sounds like someone lowering their voice to ask a friend something awkward. The pronoun then wobbles. The poem addresses "you," but line four slips into "I don't belong here," the only first-person moment in the poem. Judging by the text, the "you" works as a way of inviting the reader in while keeping the feeling at arm's length. The line "Run away or fight" reverses the familiar phrase "fight or flight," putting escape first. The body sounds an alarm, but there is nothing to run from or fight, so the alarm itself becomes the enemy.
The imagery turns this internal alarm into something physical. Nature, "in all its glorious forms," calls the speaker "to be at peace," but it only "soothes you for a time," and the phrase "for a time" quietly admits defeat. Inside the mind the feeling "festers and boils," verbs that suggest an infected wound and a pot left on the heat. Then it "consumes." Even ordinary refuges fail: walking in your home "pains you," and sleep is "a monster in itself." The dread on waking is "so palpable in the air you can taste it," which turns an emotion into weather. Nowhere is safe, not even the bed. (The line "dark recesses of you mind" appears to have a slipped word, "you" for "your," but the meaning is clear.)
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, only uneven stanzas of speech-like lines. Without rhyme there is no click of resolution, which suits a poem about a feeling that never resolves. Repetition does the work instead. "Feeling" returns again and again, and "right" is repeated in "isn't right" and "This isn't right," as if the speaker keeps testing a word and finding it doesn't fit. The sixth and seventh stanzas are built on "When... When...," a list of conditions that holds back its verdict until "That is when you know you are lost." Short lines such as "One of dread," and "To not exist," make the reader slow down on the heaviest moments.
One phrase stands out in that sequence: "the chaos of that eternal sleep." Sleep and chaos don't normally go together, and the pairing undercuts any idea of rest. The wish to disappear is voiced here, but the poem does not make it comforting.
The ending is where the title turns bitter. The last stanza shrinks to two lines, as if the poem is running out of breath. The final actions are small and passive: "You sit, you read, you let the world move around you." After all that turbulence, "stillness" might promise calm, but the last line says "You finally feel nothing." The word "finally" is the most unsettling in the poem, because it treats numbness as a relief. After so many appearances of "feeling," the poem ends on its negation.
This makes the poem worth reading. Brosemer uses plain words and few elaborate metaphors, so the poem feels like recognition rather than performance. It also offers no rescue and no lesson, which some readers may find bleak and others honest. It shows how someone sitting quietly with a book can look entirely fine from the outside while carrying the whole weight of the poem. By ending on emptiness rather than comfort, it makes that hidden experience visible.