Author S. K. Nicholas

Mental Illness and the unravelling nature of visions beyond your control. The way your head flowers with cancerous thoughts. Dead skin and daydreams, too much saliva, and not enough love. There’s a poltergeist within your brain, thinking things you don’t want it to. Drifting away, the day is absent. Your eyes always open, never closed. Even when you shut them tight, all they do is see. Too much sadness, and too much sorrow drowning everything in sight. Knives out, and mouths spilling words you’ll never hear. All sounds rendered dumb, all forms of communication pale and translucent. Every bone, limp. No hunger, no memory. Flesh too dusty and pleasures distant. Curled up on the floor, it’s too cold. Palpitations and heartbreak galore, ladybirds and boredom. A gaze vacant like beauty. Like all those buildings from your past, trapped in the hell of yesterday. The hell of yourself. The body a cage. Gasping for relief, with fingernails pried clean off. The maze of indifference, and the spiral staircase that never ends. Descending, impending. Always gloom. Sunken, submerged. Inwards. Temporal lobes and tightened throats. The ghosts are everywhere, they scratch at your face, they pull you back. Dead air and blankets, empty cribs and empty prayers. Too many holes, always letting stuff in. The ocean, the rim of sin, always collapsing. Always reducing, what you are. Salt Lake City, and the victims of Ted Bundy. Dancing against a circular landscape, with grains of sand between their toes. A million tiny rocks, a thousand lifeless souls. Head down, hands clenched. Blood boiling, veins blocked. The things we do. To escape, and to save. Hopelessly trying, to deny the inevitable. Being still, being motionless as those around you move ever on. Stationary, cautionary. The maelstrom of human sickness. There are no stars. There are no angels. Banality is king. Every day, in every way, things are falling apart. Sometimes, you try and stitch yourself together again, but it never works, and nor do you want it to. Revel in it. Down there, in the shadows, the place where you break yourself. Naked before dark glass, subdued by loss. Everlasting, and repeating. Retreating, within. The mess of decades. Upon dead leaves, and shifting down every road you’ve ever walked. Silently, regrettably, solemnly. Leave it all behind, and swim in the sea of make believe.