Fall

I had fallen into the deepest mire and remained hung, being drained of spirit and being pulled by ashy stallions by all four limbs, crying out for the frozen face of the moon. I lay there for innumerable days, tears soaking through the skin till it drenched, translucent, and my innards stopped hurting, the anxieties turned numb by habit. And then I heard the caw- a hoarse, morose call of a solitary raven, hovering around in an impenetrable bleakness, that finally landed beside me. It's beady eyes, I assumed, twinkled with the keen dark wisdom unknown to the likes of my impoverished kind.

No poetry flowed from them, nor any philosophy to soothe, but perhaps only a silky penetration, that drove deeper and deeper into me until I lay bare before it. I, it knew, that no longer remained me; I, it saw, that lay battered and torn by whispers of what I ought to be, but I that could not. The raven was no friend, but it was no foe either. Such distinctions were dead tree trunks rotting away amongst the undergrowth of the wilderness that I lay in, hosts of parasites; but the raven had come from above.

Its silence did not hide storms, it tamed them, and before its witness, I longed to surrender, to submit to whichever power ruled over me, but only if I knew which. It kept it's gaze upon me, spreading a cold sheet, until my lids finally dropped, with the tiniest droplet of hope that when they do reopen, the stallions would have released my limbs and upon the wings of the very raven, I would be lifted from the depths of the pit to a twinkling bed wherein I would lay yet again, but with the frozen face of the moon upon me.