It’s the edges that unsettle me, here in the dark of an unknown room. They hide horror. (Slip your hand down the edge. Slip your hand into its morass, the tar pit, the murky water.) The edges of a hole I will never understand only the dread, the cold sweat of a cratered body. Bottomless circles have a way of swallowing up order that way. 

But, it goes deeper. I’ve always run from edges. The time edge of a night, a precipice of mind death but worse since awakening was assured and those recurring holes filled my waking life with a texture that was dripping and crawling. Human life encased in a shell of naturally  clustered holes risked everything. It made the matter  in between the holes erratic, thin. It made waking look grotesquely accidental (though I’m sure it is not when I bob and float in my brain liquid). 

For a long time and being a practical person I tried to lengthen the time between sleep. This was for sure the method by which I would patch up my cratered existence; not just its surface but deeper. Filling in the dangerously empty tunnels of sleep that surely led to a blistering infection at the bottom with need of cauterizing. 

But after 30 years my body gave out and I could no longer engineer the bridges that cleaned and disinfected the relentless worming. In the holes there are not rats or snakes or stench as I encapsulate in the front of my head where my unease bellows and blows. It must be more that there is nothing or a change. 

And, if the matter would all stay fixed and malleable that’s all I can fit but a nothing starts with an edge and that’s what I cannot accept. The edge is a dreadful angle.

 And in it maybe there is rest.