and it never seems to end,
you can never see the end
when it’s the same every day,
perpetually gray, and nothing
seems to change—

blending and blurring yet time
keeps turning, you’re stuck between
holes two and three on your favorite belt

everything once familiar is not anymore—
strangers without faces, places
foreign and obscure that only
further estrange you—

an atrocious trip, a lofty comedown
worse still because it’s all real—
no drugs involved, it’s not drug
induced (if only it were at least
this could all be explained)—
you’re in an alternate reality
and the most dreadful part is all
the while you know you’re not—

when your home, neighborhood,
town, region, WORLD starts
to feel like a snow globe—
when you’re a goldfish in a
fishbowl, a grain of sand on this
pale blue dot, claustrophobic
in an empty sea, suffocating
in all of this S P A C E—

unable to breathe in this
attack of madness, in need of
soothing eucalyptus and its
aromatic oils therein—
in need of so much more in
frail attempts to alleviate the
anguish, to palliate the pain—

absolutely ravaged inside yet
bursting at the seams with meaning—
if only you could find the right
words to say, in the proper
order, to set it all free—

instead, succumbing to roam the same lands
on your own now, floating along with the breeze—

the memories tethered to caution tape,
or a dusty police ticker,
or a defunct radio band—
pulled through your ears
and shot through your head—
without will and without
reason, a mind of their own
that doesn’t feel the slightest
urge for a single instant
to ask for your consent—

providing waves of consciousness,
oceans of emotions, and even though
I’ve got deceased friends in my corner,
rooting me on—

it’s when the pinky pale death hues
of dawn arrive, I realize: the ones
dead and gone aren’t the ghosts—

I am.