Smothering his fingertips, he began to feel the world around him—

The lacings of light, the softness of stars

On the floorboards,

The hollowed wood of the cracked sky, the signs

His breath made as they tumbled from his lips in a string like

ragged poetry;

he might have found his path in the night but the lines he wrote,

the marks he made—

the walls swallowed them,

cut short the echoes of his footsteps,

showed him only an outline of a man

with clouded eyes in the mirror because he couldn't see how to find

himself in a world as turbulent as oceans that spit

silvered crescents and fallen fragments of the moon—

a world where he was doomed to drown.