The walls don’t close so much as tighten in the way that certainties do,
Where every old familiar comfort has been processed into residue,
The dark isn’t dramatic — it’s just the absence of the argument for light,
And the whispers aren’t a symptom; they’re just audible by night.
I’ve been standing at the rim of this specific address for a while,
The drop below is not the thing I’m calculating in my file,
It’s the quality of silence at the bottom that I keep reviewing,
And whether I’ve been falling all along or just pursuing.
Into the abyss — not violently, but gradually, the way water finds the crack,
Into the abyss — where the weight I’ve been constructing calls me back,
The floor below this floor is not the last one in the sequence,
Into the abyss — and I’ve been losing count of the decrements.
The voices in the shaft aren’t asking anything I haven’t asked myself,
They’ve organized my damage neatly on a psychological shelf,
I’ve been down here long enough that down is starting to feel horizontal,
And the exit signs above have become something theoretical and coastal.
The abyss doesn’t take you — that’s the part the narrative leaves out —
You extend yourself in its direction over the duration of the doubt,
One increment at a time the distance from the light gets statistical,
Into the abyss, and the journey is more habitual than critical.