Frayed Perceptions

Sometimes I can feel the seams sucking inwards, as if my skin ought to be taut around my cheeks and my chest and my eyes and my chin. Hollow, like a gaudy, ridiculously decorated easter egg, all the insides blown out through a small orifice at the base of my skull, mangled, and then ejected. Ejected, they withdraw to images in clouds and stories in song. Abstracted, the husk which supports their essence is ignored and beauty and love can be sought in the void.

Other times, I can see joy and love in my fellow men, like the amber light refracting from a torch through flesh and through skin. It is continuous, rich and warm like honey, like blood. And even then I abstract them and morph them into beings of utter grace as I wish they would be. I surrender completely in that swift moment of naive folly. Of course, the delusion eventually groans under the weight of reality. It shatters like the bones of an old lady, as wind inevitably blows once more, and cruelly tosses her to the ground, on her belly. As she shudders facedown, the world spins as everything... suddenly....

And the altered connections, those mangled, wrung out and knotted old neurons now surge with renewed fervor. The light was the same light those odd, curious fish from the dark depths of the oceans are drawn to. The bioluminescence-emulating fish bait, with multitudinous nasty venemous hooks now clamp on my face. My nose and mouth incarnadine, are smothered and in seeps the fear. I cannot breathe, I gasp, but all I can do is swallow my tongue. It is all one picture, everything is even more connected now, except that now the fear swallows me whole. All-powerful demons are summoned in a meticulous connivation against my persona and everything is forsaken and betrayed by impostors. The light is mocking, my stupidity and trust are stamped to my forehead; ridiculed, shamed. I am a dunce in the ninth circle of hell and my eyes are crazed and a thought whispers "I told you they couldn't be trusted."

The beasts of shadow tower as I cower, and they recede menacingly as I tell myself I'm just being silly. As they shrink they look back over their shoulders and I see their sinewy hearts through their smoke wreathed bodies. Their hearts are things of light and they glow just like your hand if you held a working lightbulb in your palm... and this sinks me like an anchor in a sea of doubt because I realise that I can no longer tell whats real and what's not.

For a few days, I am ethereal, cautious as a young hare crossing an open, snowy field in the heart of December, dawn, with pristine cyan skies. Everything is quiet now, I dare not stomp or leap lest an avalanche buries me and blows me to ground bone dust and the pristine skies turn to steel grey like a dull blade achingly slicing the rough horizon of mountains far away

Then I find somebody to share some emotion with. A story perhaps, some images, why not? In their eyes I find a small glint of light.