The Descent

Poetry

Photo by Ron Whitaker on Unsplash

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THE DESCENT 

The walls inhale sharply, yet the breath is mine.

They pull at my ribs until they creak—

pulls at the soft edges of me,

a mass that forgets the borders of its own being,

a thing that does not know where it ends.

Step forward. No, step swallows.

The floor beneath is muscle, a sinew of pulse;

it quivers with the unsaid yearning.

It does not resist.

It does not want me to leave.

There is no echo.

Only the sound of silence chewing.

My voice spills from my mouth but does not fall—

lingering, spectral vapors, 

it sticks to my lips like curdled nectar,

it stretches, it snaps, it drips onto my skin.

I climb, but the climb is a trick.

Fingers sink into something soft and yielding—

then too hard, then too wet, then nothing at all.

The walls have texture but no substance.

The walls are teeth.

The walls are whispering.

The walls are pressing against my temples,

shushing me, stroking me,

asking me to go deeper.

Light trembles, light shivers.

It moves under my skin, it worms between my ribs.

I taste colors—yellow is sharp, red is heavy,

blue is dissolving me.

Time drips down the walls in slow rivulets,

glistening, pooling at my feet,

thick as resin, thin as forgotten dust.

I am neither rising nor anchored—

only unfolding inside-out,

only slipping into the warm, pulsing hush

of something that dreams me.

It exhales, and I go with it.

Somewhere, I dissolve, like ink in water,

becoming the silence itself,

and it is the most natural unraveling in the world.

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