Seeing in the Dark?

The unseen world bites at my heels. I’ve been walking so long, and so far. Everything is blaring. And shapes come at me, as if they are seeking to enter me, and take me over. Sometimes I reach back, and am pulled into another world, brighter and darker at the same time. Sometimes I pull away and seek to escape, for everything is very loud. And I can hear the world screaming down my spine. I try to ponder the words that cloak experience in solidity. Everyone has their claim on mystery. I do not know what to believe, so I try believing nothing. That doesn’t work, for nothing is very full, and even absence has its demons. I turn to my feet, and find them dangling from my spine like string. I am walking, but this body does not feel like my own. Stories of spirits and delusions, psychosis and openings, shake around my skull like a slinky that moves horizontally, and never stops. I do not know if I am gifted or robbed. Perhaps both. My head hurts. People tell me I cannot see what is real right now. So I close my eyes, and learn to see in the dark. I enter again, and the noise stops. 

Carol Krause is a poet who writes about how sometimes not seeing clearly is seeing too clearly. This poem is part of her (unpublished) book Tending the Wasteland, a poetry collection she hopes to bring to you one day, with trembling hands. Carol’s poetry has recently appeared in PRISM international, Minola Review, The Fiddlehead, Best Small Fictions, and is forthcoming in Augur Magazine.