Straitjacket

The withering branches of the old, dead tree reached into the night sky like fingers grasping the moon. Their thin silhouettes cut into the beauty of her majestic fullness in desperate want. So I looked up into heaven to see the full moon piercing the dark blue sky, shining through the shadowy branches of a tree. It was a cold night, and no warm heart dared it. The hour of monsters had struck, and the moon bid us on in our madness.

Some called it Hell, where we had been. There were no demons there, but we were there, and there were no unquenchable flames of torment but our own feverish desires, forever unattainable in that dark place. Yet the door was opened, opened on the other side. A voice called a name, but we all came. I’m afraid that place is not like this where things are real and concrete, where you exist because you existed, it is not a place that can be, and I cannot describe it but in vagaries of metaphor.

My arms have been bound for eons in this dreadful jacket, this straight jacket of sickly, sterile white the doctors kept me in. It is yellowing with age. It sticks to me like flesh. I am part free now; I am again, and no longer was. Someone has let us loose, and I think, much like a ruptured appendix leaking its sickness into the rest of the body, we spell doom for the world.