View from the rabbit hole

I slither down the rabbit hole. I stumble into it, I jump, I fall. With no warning I break the time/space barrier and find myself inside. A shadowy premonition of what’s down there, I try to claw my way out, I give in, a prisoner on the gangplank. exhausted. It’s dark, always dark, too bright, blinding. I observe passively, I thrash and struggle. Remain calm. Freak out. No one knows I’m in there, no one saw me go in, no one will save me, they can’t hear my silence. I’m alone. Invisible as I stand before them. Everything's fine on the outside. I feel the smooth walls, they’re mossy, and when I want something hard to pound on my fist sinks into a loamy rotten mess. I want to dig my nails in and claw until they’re bleeding but through this looking glass whatever you want is unreachable, once you settle in the walls fall away and the hell is new and fresh. Hall of mirrors.

Memories are hazy until they become unexpectedly sharp, and the fuzzy thing stabs like a knife. Once kind they bring nothing but a wave of pain. I drown while I burn while I live while I die. But it’s nothing. Not the real thing. Which is what again? The contradictions are endless, as one becomes apparent it shape shifts into another. Science fiction. Everything is the same, on repeat. Beat Box.

Former pleasures elude. The release valve is broken. The pressure builds up, and flows out at a drip, the rushing becomes pulsing and then throbs, and yet the dam holds strong. And the desert grows, my lips crack the sand is salty. The withered veins harden. A landscape of crowded desolation, trembling dissonance. And despite the numbness, it hurts terrifically.

Obligation?

It descends like an unwanted houseguest who turned away would be homeless, and thus due to cruel laws of humanity and hospitality, its here to stay. It’s chaffing, obligatory, unavoidable and felt so deeply inside as to be inevitable. Its shape shifting and guileless, fascinating and exhausting. It takes up all the air in the room and space in the house threatening to burst the seams. It leaves nothing but a vast and endless emptiness. 

It flutters through the body, tampering with the mind and soul, gilding all it touches with a ribbon of numbness until piercing bright white patches of pain into unsuspecting parts of the body, causing one to gasp out loud, startled, disoriented and already plunging into a free fall over the precipice of a sudden dissolution into the same tears which are alternatively housed in one’s heart, one’s stomach and one’s throat, despite the drought it is always present in endless supply.

And I alternate between wanting to chase it away and stroke it, to sit down next to it and move myself into its good graces, offer it a cup of tea, to kill it with kindness in the attempt to know it. To seduce it? To be fascinated by it. To interrogate it, why are you here, how long will you stay, when will you go? I long to understand it, as if by thoroughly understanding it, by mastering it, by being able to dissect it  and take it apart I will be able to find an epoxy somewhere among it’s fractured pieces to slather on myself and become once again whole.