Dark days descend 

When black humors ink the void,

Like a giant squid groping

In the cold, silent depths.

You feel the pressure everywhere

Like an entire city block on your back,

Can’t see an inch in front of your face

Without feeling your eyeballs squeezed down like olives.

Can’t think except for the impossibility 

Of reason under these conditions,

Can’t imagine another life, one with diaphanous summer light

And sunrises that create the divide of day and night.

We are the aliens we dream about,

The giant squids of our own dark imaginations,

Full of malice, full of our own private

Hatreds and bigotries.

Trapped at the bottom of an ocean

Of the past, trapped in the caves of our ignorance,

Trapped in daemonic masks, stalking insecurities, rattling the sabers

Of our tongues to ward off the evil spirits of loneliness.

Ascending close to the surface

Like a moment of clarity in the middle of the day,

We sense another world

Where laughter is the water breathed,

And the days are made of light,

Like memories of running down a hill,

The air as light as a sunbeam of being

Cast across the dome of an infinite world.