"Breathing Like the Drowning Man" - A poetic attempt at channeling the unbearable weight of perpetual self-hatred.

 I don't have much to say. At least for now. All I know is that I'm not sure about this poem, I'm not sure if it even came close to what I planned to write about, or if it came close to articulating how I feel and how I've felt. I don't actually want to drown, that would be an awful way to go. But I constantly feel an immutable pull to sink into a totally silent, oppressively dark, weighted oblivion that saps the oxygen from my lungs, the thoughts from my brain, the blood from my veins, and cradles me into a welcoming pit of nonexistence. 

Drowned

Slow-motion convulsions

A despondent, resonating drone

Dwelling beside a whale carcass’s masticated face,

Tar-like eels slither 

In and out of gasping wounds

Domineering isolation

A chasm of consuming hollowness

In the lightless, weighted depths of

The necrotic ocean 

Of run-off hospital waste

I’m sinking to the bottom of

Anchored by the many knives lining my back

Cascading legions of vestigial organs,

Harvested from feral children

During communion with the eternal night,

Billow around me like a gentle breeze

As the darkness swells

And the ocean floor swallows me in.

Swollen tongue flicks gnawed bits of flesh

Lost between gnashing yellowed teeth,

Spastic, graying limbs chop through 

Cycles of churning currents,

All uncanny impossible movements

Of my broken, contorted body

Digging deeper 

Into the widening twilight crypt

Beckoning open 

By the command of the imprisoning sea. 

How much further

Can I take this?

Atomic internal pressure

Builds and builds

Until, behind exploded glasses,

Teary, lifeless eyes 

Rapidly melt and flow upwards to the surface

Like milky white plumes of smoke,

Breaching the darkened, voracious waves

And coil around the 

Dislodged, sinking moon

Singing melancholic madness 

As it corrupts the atmosphere 

And stirs the tides into chaotic vortexes

Sucking in oblivion. 

Few remaining survivors on land

Chant endless babbling backward nonsense

Praying for understanding

Praying for an escape

For something to greet them 

At the miserable, ill-fated end.

All the while, 

They devour each other 

In cataclysmic firmaments 

Of hysterical self-flagellation 

And howling, grinning fits 

Of neighborly evisceration.

Destroyed wombs of the forest

Rain down over me,

Going under deeper,

Inhuman screeches echo downward

Bouncing off briny walls 

Of the sightless trench enclosing me,

Is this voice coming from me? I thought 

I cut open my throat long ago. 

A darkening oblivion 

Into only more horrific unknowns

Water-lodged burials of our primordial ancestors

Await me

Reawakening, clawing their way out 

To take back what’s rightfully theirs,

Just a maddening, oxygen-deprived delusion

Desperately gifting purpose 

To this endless, lawless suffering. 

But there’s nothing responsible,

No grand purpose 

For this ceaseless descent,

There’s only me 

And my self-imposed 

Punishment. 

Now something swirls

Up the remaining veins in my shredded throat

Bulging the shriveled flesh

My skin unzipped, serrated wrinkled sections 

Waving wildly under the

Relentless silent churning,

Unspooling intestines rupture

Leaking out strange geometrically absurd rainbows

As they rise into the last shafts of moonlight 

Piercing the whirlpool abyss. 

Rivulets of tangled hair clumps come undone

Ripped away, forcibly removing the scalp

And unveiling 

The soiled, infested contours of my skull,

Brain folds unspooling, growing pale 

Manifesting depressive thoughtforms 

Surging out

Along with a procession of dead, aquatic parasites

Gorged on rotten DNA-filled 

Pathways of blood

That burst out from my undulating chest cavity 

Taking with them every dead dream,

Failed ambition

Unrequited love,

And suicidal ideation 

To all gather in a submerged, dissecting cloud

Flaying alive the still squirming 

Drowning facade 

That once held my name 

And made a mockery of existence 

With my face. 

-

Heaviness, silence

The tide pulls and erodes the rest of the shoreline,

Rotten barnacle-ridden docks,

Century-old homes, carnivals of 

Buried corpses 

All uprooted, unearthed 

And dragged into the sea. 

Sinking, surging, falling through 

The bubbling blackness 

And careening right above

Whatever’s left of

My exploded,

Mutely screaming head. 

Goodbye. 

I should have been lost to time 

I should have been forgotten 

Left to slowly decay

Under the flogging rain 

That still plip-plops on the bottom of the ocean floor.

But I remain, insignificant. 

Unfit to even end things in dramatic, painful parades

Of pitiful self-hatred.

What’s left is a cosmic blight,

A haunted miscreation

A missed opportunity 

For a miscarriage,

Helplessly tumbling towards

An endlessly unobtainable annihilation,

No matter how hard I try,

There is no end. 

I deserve 

To drown. 

 -