Under a Black Rainbow

  I don't know if this is simply a part of the aging process, but the number of people I know who can legitimately say they're happy is smaller than those that say otherwise. The walls I've spent decades erecting in order to keep out the malaise have started to decay. Their cement is crumbling, failing, allowing eroded stone to become loose and dangerous at great heights. Holes have begun to form on either side of the wall, letting in whatever it is that sours me from the inside out.  Personally, I am in my own worst timeline. My creative spark sputters on good days, but never fully lights. My nights are mostly sleepless, averaging around three hours of super lucid dreaming. When the nightmares come, they are vivid and they are tangible. I can taste their grime; I can feel the deep rumble of their insides; I awake and feel their sweat along my body. The landscape of my imagination is hot and hardscrabble, pockmarked with the animals that thrive in the absence of nourishment

During the early days of the pandemic, I stumbled across a few different things online that caught my interest. One of them was a role-playing game by the name of Call of Cthulhu (CoC). Based on the writings of HP Lovecraft (a super problematic dude, even by the standards of his era), I often describe the game as "like Dungeons & Dragons, but set in the 1920s and revolving around the nature of cosmic horror rather than anything having to deal with high fantasy."  The two are really only similar in that both are games played by people who roll dice to see how the narrative plays out. Where the characters found in D&D become better, stronger, faster, more powerful and can potentially go to war with gods...the characters in CoC are normal human beings, pushed to the edge of their mental stability as they uncover more about cults, cultists, and the cosmic, uncaring beings they worship during the time of Prohibition (though other settings in other eras exist as well).  I&#

(A work in progress) I've been falling asleep to voices. Before the still and quiet comes, before that time of hazy present, I can hear them crawling and chittering in the walls, their secrets slithering through my linens and into my bloodstream. I can feel them filling every pore and then wasting away through my skin, disapparating slowly.  I can feel them climbing up the veins and arteries - expanding or thinning out where necessary - before finding their way up top where they take to circling around the folds of my gray matter. There, they navigate the memorials of so many dead moments, maneuver around the nearly dead ones, and take stock of those that will die eventually.  Smoke dreams. I smoke the dreams. The letters of their phrasing meld into the wisp, melt, drip down into my crevices. "Ride the abyssal black of Alecto; paint the sinners in Megaeran red; dessicate it all with Tisiphone's rot and poison." The smoke becomes a part of me the way the voices do, mel