I stand on a bridge overlooking Perdition
I built this bridge with my own miserable spackle.
A terrible concoction of my own hand.
I lean over the banister-

There is no banister.
Falling.
Falling for an indeterminable and instantaneous epoch
I’m plunged into writhing, rope-burned extremities.
They poke and prod.
They’re angry! They don’t want me here.
They try to push me back up. They can’t.

Jealous.
Disappointed.
I begin to sink, but a mass halts my descent, and a voice:
“Hell is full; your time will come.”

And in vain, I protest:
“Take me with you! Why put me back?”
But the voice does not respond, and

The arms of the pale-white damned raise me up from Perdition
From the brink.
I glimmer in the twilight streetlights
Like a bronze phoenix.
Thrust back into foggy delusion.
Mortality.