“This piece explores substance use and dark, intrusive thoughts. Reader discretion advised.”

Ascension 8/15/2026

Amphetamine eyes trace the streets on this night, 
Street lamps turning into moving beings staring at me under a canopy black as pitch. 
Casting light in my path in a way only I will know or understand, 
Grass, cement, dirt, the terrain means nothing in this maze, 
Under my feet each step feels like it's stuck in sand then propelled with wrath towards the sky. 

Why wake and anchor myself from this journey? 


My mind ascends, my thoughts drift to greater heights 
past what the body was or could form to hold, 
Flailing, my arms reach blindly, fiercely whiplashed away from my body, 
Towards time, towards eternity. 


Why wake? End such a beautiful trance? 


My body has begun to navigate creation itself, goosebumps, burning and prickling into my skin, 
And as my speed picks up past limits of light, my thoughts of endless racing blur together and no longer seem to matter, just disappear. 
Colors, such splendid crimson, indigo, fusion of molten magenta and acid lime, explode into my eyes. 
Permanently pigmenting my brain so fast, unable to remember the path to this nowhere I can't name. 
The universe keeps its secrets in beauty, unable to translate, but my mind's thoughts are calm, 
In perfect dance with time and space. 


Why wake? Feel the heavy return from nowhere? 


The voids in my head overflow with stimuli, noise in my brain starting to creep back in, 
my ruminating thoughts entwined with the cosmos, warped reality, 
Vision, hearing, organs pumping, electricity of the brain caught and balled like string. 
Blinding my consciousness temporarily  by  romanticized recollections of me doing good. 
And my grip on perfection begins to lose strength, a solitary microcosm, 
Plummeting back to earth. 
Maybe tomorrow will not come and on the way back I will crash and burn, 
And I pray the awe of my fictional reality through time may persist through my dull pain, 
Just want to keep that unspeakable frantic, chemically induced time slippage that went by in a blink of an eye. 
I just call it happiness, but it always disappears for good, 
The journey is never the same, unlike the daily routine of the grounding back to earth. 
Slow dull… 
Panic-induced rejection of ordinary life… 

Why wake. Why wake at all. 

A link to the post of the next chapbook I am working on updated with poems as they come.