Orange Life Preserver

Monstrous beasts behind every creaking, white, paint peeled door,

so you keep them closed.

Thick, steaming saliva dripping from the dulled teeth they bare,

yellowed and eager to tear into you and slowly rip apart your very being.

They make you cold with just the very thought of their long fingers wrapped around your leg

pulling you deeper and deeper into the vacant pit.

So dark, the air itself surrounds you becoming thick with the absence of anything.

Drowning in the dark

alone, desperately trying to ignore the beasts that are now teaming at the edges of the pit

one hand moves slowly through the fog to grip the small dented orange life preserver.

Appearing out of the fog, so sacred.

So light within your fingers.

Slowly peeling off the innocent lid, blue and rigid,

the orange pill bottle now rattles.

Three hundred milligrams of unknown sanity drop into scared palms.

Three hundred milligrams of sanity prescribed by society within the empty nothing

now ingrained into your being as you force it past your whimpering lips, until it becomes you

dependent upon a single white pill to feel the sun above the pit, of which you cannot see,

To feel it graze upon the paled skin

covering the pulsing nerves within the desolate place.

A single white pill to keep the beasts at bay

now becoming what you mustn’t live without.