Dan Enache Poet Free verse

Fever of the Abyss

Fever of the Abyss

My palms catch fire in an instant, an ember waking beneath the skin,
and the heat trickles down my soles, nesting quiet in the arch.
The blanket that once failed to warm me turns into a smothering shroud,
and my body melts into the mattress, wax burning in a stranger's flame.

I slip off my silk bonnet slowly — a knot, a crown of thorns,
and the room spins in the darkness, a wheel without an axle.
I sink and float all at once in the hands of an undecided god,
my eyelids are heavy stones, yet the old jazz rocks me gently.

As the music climbs toward its peak, I bury myself behind my eyes,
my fingers claw at the emptiness — a void with no face, no name,
my feet push upward, as if against a river flowing the wrong way,
and my heart, whispering in the dark, begs a sign from the silent abyss:

"Reveal yourself, o great abyss, from whom all things were born,
judge me, mortal wanderer, lost in your shoreless sleep."
My arms catch a tangled vine, a rope swaying in the wind,
and just as I start to climb toward the light, it snaps with a hollow crack.

I wake up gasping, cold sweat running down my forehead like dew,
the clock says noon, but the cold inside me won't leave.
The sun creeps through the window, fighting the papers taped up against it,
gentle tentacles of light — and still, I feel nothing but cold.

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