Halocination

The moon wrapped in its own halo.
Friendly voices gathered around me on the pavement.
A smaller, crimson moon flickered in and out,
hanging from the rolling paper between my lips.

Light words spun through the circle,
we, evenly spaced like points in space,
made language into a net that held time suspended in its place.

Then.
Inexorable. Cold.
I was a blurred point among the others, no longer defined,
fading into the lunar halo.
Banned from reality.

I saw their eyes for the last time,
searching my shape in their irises,
then I died.
Skin colonised by thin threads,
worms feeding on what was left.
I swear I could feel them.

Waves of panic,
breaking, shaking,
making my throat ache.

Air turned to fabric
in the dark of my larynx,
knotted like a bedsheet,
hanging.

“I’m dead.”
Dead weight. Dead state.
Six times in my head, like a door I can’t close, slammed again and again.

Then.
Silence.
A weightless body, eyes without sight.
Life without life.
Calm.
Strangely warm.

Years of walking with effort,
searching for death,
I held her, kissed her,
like lost children found again.

Hold me close, my daughter,
take off my shoes
and speak to me of you.

But my mind was still working,
gathering words from a living memory,
“where death binds blood to its own blood.”

So

I became a child again,
bent almost dead on a sofa
searching for eyes that would stay close,
in the darkness of a tomb made of backrests and cushions — over.

I didn’t want to be dead anymore.
A scream tore my cheeks open.
“He’s insane,” I heard from far away, broken.

I cried — they say.
I kicked — they say.
I said his name — they say.
The name of someone I never want to meet again.

I ran, finding the cold iron of street lamps.
Blurred lights, sharp.
I met the headlights of a car in the middle of the road, and I laid into them.
Impact.

Sitting alone on a pavement,
unknown voices:
“He’s fine.”
“He’s fine.”
I looked at my fingers, no longer black.
Samson shaking the pillars
of my being.
And so I cracked back.

Days later, it still doesn’t pass,
it comes back like a shockwave — fast,
shaking the organs.
Breath thinning even with ice cream in my hand,
even in friends speaking about things I don’t understand,
even in train windows and passing sound.

Still there,
still everywhere,
disturbing every sound — or so it sounds.

Days spent realising it was an hallucination,
a past that never took place,
a fracture in perception.
A distortion while awake.
I caught my breath,
and dream not to dream that dream again.

Thanks for reading