Nosedive..!

This is not sadness.
This is the undoing of emotion.
This is the result of having swallowed down
the tragedy too many times.
Of constantly batting away the thoughts
no one wants to hear about.
This is the consequence of pushing down
the monster too often.
It is a hefty price to pay.
Try hauling around an empty urn.
What’s the metaphor there?
I am dead space.
I am remnants kept for sentimental reasons.
Has your stomach ever bottomed
out in a moment of dread?
Imagine that feeling never going away.
Imagine your navel down at your ankles.
Everything going straight through you.
My chest is an empty amphitheatre
that echoes the sound of a dove call.
There is no precise way to explain it,
but it doesn’t stop me trying.
Imagine a river gone dry that runs
with the ghost of its water.
That is the feeling.
Imagine a house grown over with ivy.
How the doors would rust themselves jammed.
Imagine the silence of that abandonment.
Now picture a string of fairy lights after one
of the bulbs goes out.
Don’t they all follow the example?
One of my bulbs went out.
Now I am slowly flickering into darkness.
Listen for the sound of a penny hitting the bottom
of a well.
What if you never hear it?
That is also the feeling.
Falling through space.
Nowhere to go. Just an infinite nosedive.
Imagine that. A plane ran out of fuel plummeting
through a sky that has no boundary.
No crash landing.
No news story.
No body count to speak of.
Just the endless descent.
I am not good at trying to describe this.
It’s why I give you images.
It’s why I speak analogies.
It is not a thing to articulate.
It’s a thing to have inside you.
Something long gone limp.
Crumpled as a broken bird wing.
Small as a baby’s fist.