The Darknesses Within

We humans are such fragile things.

The darknesses we hold inside us –

deep and consuming enough to digest galaxies –

have somehow found homes

in our foreign bodies.

We try to contain them with our weak minds,

pretending to comprehend their depths.

We camouflage them beneath our thinning flesh,

hoping the emptiness doesn’t leak out

or our false colors seep in.

But their escapes are inevitable.

Whether as a flashflood or an erected mountain,

our darknesses will make themselves known,

will have their ways with us,

will break us up to tear us down.

They’ll hold our hands as we climb higher

just to watch us fall for longer,

always waiting until we falter

near an edge to shove us over.

Then our black holes will eat us –

chew bite stab slice and swallow

until our insides are fecal and fallow –

and they will walk around

in our leftover skins,

smug shit-bags who thought we were

too good to be seized by what we hide inside.

They’ll go on pretending they’re us

until they can get close enough with someone else.

And once our decaying corpses

become too troublesome,

they’ll jump ship to their next hosts,

leaving us to rot and fester –

flailing as we fall to the ground –

slumped in a heap of ourselves:

the wasted snack of something

incomprehensibly stronger than all

our mental wrestling could ever grapple

or years of denial could ever outpace.