If you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you. I know this to be true, even if the abyss is not necessarily anything outside myself. The abyss is simply, The Abyss. It is not within me or without me, it is just being. And I do gaze into it. I don't really take this to mean that I will become like my hates or enemies, as I believe that I have always been what I hate- my own worst enemy. I take this to say that The Abyss, for however long I look into it, also looks into me. It leaves marks on my soul; deep gouges made with stained black talons. The Abyss is many things, and also nothing at the same time. It is darkness, that is a given, it is also The End. It is The Apocalypse, it is The End of Time. The Abyss is the complete-stop-of-everything. Some people even believe that the surging water-deep of a literal abyss is Hell itself, though I think I know better. The Abyss is not Hell, because when your soul is released from your vessel, and you of course have committed sin, you do not go to The Abyss. Your soul does not forever reside in the Nothingness of The Abyss, your soul does not belong to it unless it belongs to you. Even so, after looking into The Abyss for a long period of time, it is hard to shake the feeling of its eyes on you. It can linger for days, and the restless, dreamless state that those eyes leave you in is hard to leave behind. As someone who is constantly staring into The Abyss, I find that it never quite leaves me. It's almost as if The Abyss has left some part of it inside me, within my very being. I can't hope to root it out without never seeing into The Abyss ever again, and I don't imagine that will happen any time soon. The Abyss has been a... comfort to me. The promise of Nothingness, of simply Not Being, has always appealed to me. This existence of mine has not been an easy one, but it has been growing on me. Even with the promise of Nothingness, I think that I will try and stay Existing for as long as I can. Existing has its perks of course. I get to think and feel and experience, and part of that Feeling is Love, which I believe may be the most important one of all. What is there, without Love?

That, I believe, is what The Abyss actually is. Lack of Love.

Hiding in my stomach
where no one can find her
is a beast.

She's a shapeshifter, this monster.
Sometimes her skin is leathery
and membranous,
and wings stretch where her arms used to be.

Sometimes she's a mass of fur and
horns and talons.
Sometimes she's just a fog of darkness
leaking into the world.

But she never lets me forget
that she's there.
When I look into the mirror, I see her.
I'll touch my face
and find it utterly human,
and yet my reflection is a leviathan.
A demon.
She used to terrify me,
make me sweat and shake from fear.

But I've come to accept
that this is what I am.
A monster
whose teeth are stained with blood
of mine and others.
I can never brush them clean.

As I inspected the witch's cottage,
my gaze fell upon a curious looking
jar on a shelf.
It was full of eyes.

The witch noticed, or sensed,
my discomfort
and simply said,
"The eyes contain the soul."

For the rest of the day,
I sat on the creaking floor
and examined each eye.
They appeared to be glass,
but I knew that was likely a rouse.

So, with kitchen cleaning gloves
I fished the next eye out of
the Mason jar and lifted it up to my own.

It was about as large as the others,
but molten honey colored,
and the iris took up so much space,
while the pupil was very small.
I turned to the witch, the eye still in hand.

"What kind of eye is this?" I asked,
showing the eye to her.
She pried it out of my grasp and felt
all over it, her eyes closed.

"It belonged to an elephant." she said,
handing it back to me.
Upon seeing the look on my face, she clarified,
"It died of natural causes, and I never ask for them.
They find their way to me."

I considered this.
"What other kind of eyes do you have?"
The witch smiled, and led me into another room,
full of jars on shelves.
This time they were organized, labeled with
the name of the creature.

Mouth open in awe,
I looked around the room in wonder.
The eyes ranged from human,
to elephant, to squid.
There were so many different sizes
and colors.
The labels told me the creature,
and some of them I had never heard of.

"Do they really hold the soul?"
The witch nodded.

"Each of these eyes belonged to a different living being,
who is now gone.
Their eyes, or souls, rather
find their way to me.
I keep them safe until the soul is ready
to be used in a vessel again."

I frowned.
"So, one day, all these will be gone?"
She nodded again.

"And a new set will take its place."
The witch patted the top of my head
with her weathered hand.
"Someday, you'll be the one to watch over
the souls.
It'll be up to you
to keep them away from harm."

Carefully, I put the elephant's eye
in the jar and ******* the lid closed.

Now I wait for my turn
to keep the souls safe.

He appeared to me in a dream.
Everything-
the lights
the darks
the undefined space in which we resided-
was being eaten.
He devoured worlds.
Planets, galaxies, universes
were being ****** into him
by nothing other than his seer will.
He was completely incredescent.
I could not reach him,
could not touch his radiance.
All I was able to do was watch
my eyes glued to him
as everything I knew
went down his throat
with a bob of his Adam's apple.

And when I awoke,
all I could think about
was that I had to know him.
I had to know this young man
who gleefully
consumed.

I wonder what it all tastes like.
If my dream matter was tangy and sweet
if the wishes of mine he ate were bitter
if the stars taste like anything you could describe with human words.

Maybe one day,
I'll see him again
and he'll indulge me
in the taste of everything.

Most believe
that not knowing
will drive you mad.
But really
learning the truth
can make you just as crazy.

It's a different kind of psychotic, yes.
But insane nonetheless.

There are secrets
secrets to this world
that a meager human mind
should not learn
should not have to hold.

Sometimes those fiendly deities slip up.
They leave a door open
a window cracked
and suddenly!
a human knows too much.

There are consequences, of course.
The natural order will always be restored,
in due time.
But alas, it is not the clumsy god who is punished,
no, if only it worked that way.
No, as it has been since humans
first walked,
the poor mortal man must be punished
for learning
listening when he ought not to.

And that's where the madness of knowing
comes in.
As punishment for the deities' wrongdoings.
The natural order is restored by erasing the man's
sanity.
And once it is gone,
it is impossible to retrieve.

So be careful, little mortal,
when you wish in the well for infinite knowledge,
you never know what mischievous god
may be listening.

My life used to be full of life.
It tasted like dried apricot
and banana chips.
It smelled like a sun-warmed dog
and sunflowers.
It felt like cool water on sun-baked skin
and rain sizzling against asphalt.

And it struck me as beautiful
years later
when I'd spent so much time in the dark.
I never realized
the exact moment
when my skies became so dark and menacing.
I can't pinpoint the year
in which I forgot what lives in the light.

You tell me to get past the dark
to work through it
but who would I be without it?
Baby, I may have grown up in darkness,
but I am the most beautiful ******* star in the sky
you just need a little darkness to see it.

There's a dull drumming
a music to all things
and sometimes it seems like I'm the only one who
can hear the rhythm.
Like how the lights radiate vibrato violins
and the lawnmower outside
sings opera.
Or how the crickets at night,
with their apparent music
chirp a lullaby for the Wild Things.

The Wild Things
aren't strictly monsters
made of hoof and horn,
but sometimes they are children
with the soul of a wild horse
or a mountain lion.
Sometimes they are women
who dreams have never been
stuck in twilight.
Sometimes they are men
who wish for something more.

Sometimes they are creatures
with no body. Just a soul incarnated as a central being.
Sometimes the Wild Things aren't really things at all,
but songs and stories told to babes
who wander too far from their mothers
sometimes they are just animals
ones we can't see nor hear nor smell.
Ones we can only imagine in our wildest,
most fruitful dreams.

The Wild Things,
they don't have one place where they all go,
like the stories foretold.
Instead, they have many safe places
lairs and hideaways and crypts and haunts
all around us. Sometimes,
those places
are within us.

The music of the Wild Things.
Not everyone can hear.
Only other Wild Things can listen to it.
And as such,
I have forgotten my duties as a young woman
on an earth full of human pests
and resumed my life as a Wild Thing
with my hideaway as
underneath the clothes in my closet.
I could build a tunnel down through the ground
and connect my crypt
with those of the other Wild Things
so that we may dance and sing our songs together
in a cave beneath the world.