I am screaming.
At the top of my lungs
I am yelling.
Contorted and bent beyond recognition
My body curls on the bed sheets,
On the mattress
Whose body has been mangled too
By the darkest ideas that tumble
Noiselessly out of my stretching lips.
My bared teeth, the jaw of a caged animal,
Locked in fear masked as intimidation,
Fingers dug into the soft plush of the body,
Gauging holes the size of fists
So that it is not myself that I ruin, instead
In my hands I will hold this writhing creature,
Reaching for the outside of the bubble.
The particles move like sand, suspended in midair
I shift them quietly out, dripping each grain so that it no longer
Plagues me.
Afterwards there is the same handful,
On my palms lying,
Reaching for the outside of the bubble
The particles move like sand, suspended in midair
I shift them out quietly dripping each grain so that it no longer
Wets the dread on my tongue.
Once more a fist full,
in between my curled fingers residing,
reaching for the outside of the bubble
the particles move like sand, suspended in midair
I shift them out quietly dripping each grain so that it no longer
Lurches my stomach so viciously it takes my lungs with.
The panic settles
The electricity that it sends makes me cry out in anger
And agony.
I keep digging, I keep removing more particles that move like sand suspended in midair
But it keeps rising and I am clutching at my throat, at my heart, at my laboring rib cage,
And it falls and rises heavily,
But even a breath isn’t enough, the air cannot break it’s way in nor can it escape
The tissues that trap it beneath my beaded skin,
And the sand… It does not stop filling,
It rushes in crowds,
In an hourglass,
To the thrum of my heart that is pounding
And even that, an organ so deep inside me I can for once call something my own,
Thumps mockingly to the seconds that rush by
Which turn into minutes, to hours, to days, to months, to years.
And I am just paralyzed with raw fear.