Noah’s Wooden Whale
Shutting my eyes, my pupils dilate—
Swirls converge, and I enter the void.
A cosmos inside my head, black and boundless,
Weightless, like a prayer unanswered.
For a moment, there’s peace.
Then—
A crack.
A rumble.
Deep in the distance,
Like a white wooden whale breaking apart in slow motion.
It creaks—
The sound is bigger than the body itself.
Fragile. Dangerous.
Shifting on a rusty lynchpin.
A beast of impossible weight,
Carrying a twisted cargo
Animals stacked in its belly,
Elephants pressed against the walls.
Monkeys and serpents piled into its bowels,
Contained only by the emptiness of my soul.
Enough elephants to fill every room in the world.
Monkeys enough to break the back of even the strongest of men.
Serpents enough to tempt a million Gardens of Eden.
This—
This cobbled monstrosity is my addiction.
It lumbers inside me,
Draped in shadows, stitched together by regret.
It is the beast I feed.
The monster I fear.
I grip the stiletto,
But my ego withers—
“You can’t kill this thing without killing yourself.”
I feel human.
But smaller than I should be.
A speck beneath a titan.
Inside my head,
The universe feels delicate,
Like a grenade rattling in a fishbowl—
Clink. Clink.
A warning.
Butterflies beat inside my gut,
But they carry no beauty.
Only the fear that my mistakes will spill into the real world,
That the ghosts will slip through the cracks.
I open my eyes.
The whale pulls at my bones.
A force so strong it warps me on a molecular level.
Too scared to watch it collapse,
I lubricate the creaks.
Manmade or natureborn,
It makes no difference—
A rush of a gamble.
The thrill of a robbery.
I toss my last gold coin—
The beast must eat.
Krill to the hunger,
Another fix to keep it at bay.
A few more days,
A few more hours,
A few more minutes.
Clink. Clink.
The grenade settles back in place.
Nestled against the weight of all I fear.
The faces of death—
Of those I loved.
Of those I wish I’d never seen.
The cries of youth.
The scrapes of self confidence.
The jungle of impulsivity.
Waiting to consume me whole.