Recovery is usually pictured as a door that shuts behind you. Susovan's "Sinking soul" describes something messier: someone who has mostly climbed out of despair and can still feel the water rising. The opening lines announce relief entirely through negatives. The speaker is "not filled with void anymore," the pain no longer hits "deep down to my core," and life is "no more a host to grief." Even the phrasing is strange and precise. Void is treated as a substance that can fill a person, and grief as a guest, or a parasite, that once lived inside them. Then comes "Still, sometimes;" and the semicolon works like a held breath before the admission: "I find myself gnawing at my sanity." The gnawing is done by the speaker, not by some outside force, which makes it more unsettling.
The central image is drowning, and it is drawn with unusual care. The body is split into zones: "My eyes above the ocean / Body numb below / Ears open to the mocking waves." The eyes still see the surface, the body has gone dead, and the ears, which can't be shut the way eyelids can, take in the waves' mockery. The grammar adds to the effect. "My heart drowning / My soul sinking" and "Blood turning cold" use present participles with no helping verb, so the action never finishes. "About to immerse" leaves the speaker at the edge, always about to go under and never quite there. The heart is "still naive" and "too scared of its grave," and the poem seems to read that fear as a stubborn instinct to live. The word "naive" suggests the heart hasn't learned to give up.
Formally, the poem refuses to settle. It has no stanza breaks, no regular meter and almost no end punctuation, so the reader never gets a pause to come up for air. Lines range from the two-word "Not broken" to longer, heavier ones. Enjambment creates hesitation, as when "The pain doesn't" stops before the line admits what it does not do. Rhyme appears only at the start, in "anymore," "core" and "more," and then dissolves, as if the poem loses its footing along with the speaker. Later, "waves," "naive" and "grave" are linked only by a faint, soft closing sound. The vocabulary is also worth noticing. Plain, bodily words like "gnawing," "numb" and "cold" sit next to formal, almost medical ones: "existential angst," "affliction," "incurable," "succumbed." The speaker seems to be looking at their own suffering from a distance, like someone reading their own chart. Even there the language hedges, since the affliction "often seems incurable," not simply is.
The turn comes when water gives way to earth. The body "succumbed / Resolved in the earth again." "Resolved" can mean dissolved, but it also means settled, as a conflict is. Drowning becomes burial, and burial starts to look like planting: the body is there "to deliver a piece of mine." The poem never says what that piece is. It might be a memory, a poem or simply something that grows from what was lost. What follows is a three-part denial: "Not broken / Not aching / Not a sinking soul, inutile." The last phrase undoes the poem's own title. The rare word "inutile," meaning useless, suggests that beneath the fear of sinking lies a fear of being worthless, and the ending answers it.
That answer is deliberately small. "Perhaps, like a flash of beauty" hedges with "perhaps" and offers a "flash," something brief and sudden, not a lasting light. The poem does not claim a cure. It claims only that suffering might leave something worth having behind.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. It avoids both the wallowing of pure despair and the false cheer of a happy ending, and it shows how a hard, invisible state can be made visible through one sustained metaphor, a body half in and half out of the water. It also shows that recovery can contain relapses, and that the hope at its end can be real while still uncertain.