Forget everything that is known.
Head above water,
drowning between the folds.
I thrash,
rolling through linen tides’ ripping shoals,
pulling sinew threads of a grating toll.
Picking the stitches,
crack the sky,
urchins’ spires invade my spine —
a piking pyre of nerves.
Shredded daylight devouring night,
the hour’s dripping shallows pass the threshold of sleep,
as I sink —
further into trenches of unnumbered days,
a long stretch,
sanity escaping my grip —
lurking in the depths of my parasomaniacal mind.
A prisoner of a dozen reflecting suns,
moons of blazing onyx amidst the endless seams,
anchored —
caught between the chains’ iron spikes and the shackled stars,
fading into another obliterated dawn I cannot flee,
not allowed to rise.
Morning comes —
towing me under again.
Burrowing deep beneath the spoors of my sopor —
these bed bugs bite hard.
Broken fingers’ antennation flicking hours in a cuckoo’s craze.
Pitter-patter.
Stomp.
Stomp.
A toe-tapping, knee-bouncing, crawling twitch inching past the skin —
a relapsing itch.
Running laps in a trackless sunken desert.
Spinning out along terrors’ cascades,
the draining maze,
rising dunes of sopping decay.
Am I a memory,
a physical presence,
tangled roots in the seasons that have bled out onto the floor?
The gravity of this space never loses its pull.
Brushing through the waking world,
a painting in disguise,
lines streaking across cemented skies.
Take all of the colors and polish it black.
But a mere moment has passed,
temporal distortion deluding,
shifting through my horizontalization,
this inhumane concept of time.
A trap door,
an undeniable allure,
a chorea lure —
shimmying past its jammed shims.
Expanding as my sight falls below its sill.
Bones of my wreckage,
piling high across its plate.