Delusive Days, Dilated Nights

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.