I could be the drumbeat in your chest like madness before a storm swirling restlessly.

All suffer and none should have to. But why not? If suffering makes life seem more real or more abstract, both circumstances are infinitely more bearable than the disturbing reality of mundane work-to-live-then-die-bored life.

we met one strange summer

in a regular tangle of sticky webs

you had the air of angels sweet but I--

drowned with the damned spirits

in lava oceans fearing your--

foreign static frequency

and grey-green eyes

(I swear they are even if you--

think otherwise): storms

calm ones, calmer than my--

raging coals, empty and dead

you speak of souls like you believe

always an optimist in pessimistic

skin of ivory and titanium mesh...

Maybe I should stop while I'm ahead

Nay, I swim with sea-demons

no sweet summer tuned radio

over my sunless desertscape

how does it burn without the sun?

Sometimes it can be as brutally overwhelming as a tidal wave flooding every orifice, the suffocation, the pressure, the immensity of this damnable depression like an ocean, unsurmountable. It swallows me whole and gnaws at my very bones. It floods me over and over, drowning me over and over... It is a torturous broken record player with a scratched disc on repeat, the wailing disrupting any possible good remaining after the tsunami. It wails and wails inside my ribcage and inside my skull. I cannot make it stop.

...few truly understood how disheartening it was to be cut off from worlds so strange and distant they remained to us fantasies rather than distant realities, too surreal and foreign to be touched. Their minds were fixated on what they knew to be real, unable to create the atmospheres of the nebulous realms that lay just beyond our reach, just beyond the dimming horizon, our celestial limits.