This is not a dream.

He comes at 2:45 AM. Sometimes 4:28 AM. Once close to 6 AM.

Within my brain is an inferno, raging on dully, winding on and on, in a spiral.  

I am aware of where I am.

I am submerged in a glistening marble tub filled to the edge with boiling water.

It is dark.

This room is tight, small.

It is dark.

And in a piercing veil of moonlight, he comes to me.

His face, immaculate, eyes like iridescent pearls, and a jaw sculpted by Michelangelo.

A shadow so magnetic, drawing to the water, closer and closer.

“Come, all you who are thirsty.”  

Seductively, like advancing upon an old lover, he approaches.

Hidden in his hand are

Diamonds.

Laced within the allotropes are promises of peace and freedom from want.

Oxycodone. Percocet. People have many names for him.

He beckons me to take them, his whispers, his breath

Hot like a lighter lit too closely to a pale, white orchid.

Saying,

“I am God.”

Speaking to me like an ancient psalm, a hymn I once sung

In the churches I frequented, and in the moment, I take them from his hands.

And so then, I swallow, and the scalding water burning through my skin swallows me, in a rage, raving and thrashing as God pushes me down with almighty strength, and I cannot breathe, and like fireworks and bursting grenades, flashes of a child laughing and smiling with his family, his mother and father clearly and evidently engulfed with pride, my thoughts endlessly streaming out like putrid vomit of every color, splashed onto the canvas like a signature Jackson Pollock, the impurity within me, purged, like a parasite, a tapeworm, scorched in the inferno whirling faster into an unstoppable storm, a hurricane, a cyclone, as I, this paper tiger, swallow down my breaths, with cherubim and seraphim, strumming their lyres, and then before me, underneath the water, the gates of heaven swing open wide, and I reach out my hand, with nothing but a dream to hold on to, as the fire grows greater, and in such a reverie of passion, fury, and eternal struggle, by such divine asphyxiation, I am strangled by the arms of the Lord,

And I wake up.

“Not today,” I say.

Everything I am, but the engine of my own destruction.  

Never have I completely destroyed myself, only to realize the necessity of my existence.

I am aware of where I am.

And where I am now.

It is light.

It is light.

If you have ever felt the inferno burning in your mind. Keep going. Keep living. Let it burn bright and forever.