Fever Dream

I've been very sick a few times in my life and it was a very frightening experience. This poem is an attempt to explain the mental wreckage that you become when a realllly high fever eats at your thoughts. Well, at least what it was for me.

There I was in the middle in no place but here
everywhere, it seemed, was on vacation, but not fear
I was inside all of nothing peering out toward the lifeless mechanical orb
Somehow captured by the clinging cold fingers like dirty hands, dead and lifeless they absorbed
My fear hollered, “Let me free!”
I was a prisoner of the white fog - the fever dream

I raced across this un-reality, I moved without thought to another place
this feeling at least convinces me “I must be elsewhere?” No taste.
But this place is known you see so I move to another...race to another
I frantically dash to others strung out in rows
more, more, more. All the same! All familiar!
Such loathing of the familiar, this same-familiar surrounding me, drowning me

I grow sick inside and attempt annihilation
by summing up all my inner powers
and stuffing them into this beast that will not change
tying stifle it
this deranged place

and

with a bloom of blinding brightness what I wanted is won
all is destroyed
and there is emptiness in the place of change
and growing sadness in the place of rage
I am left with a realization that what I destroyed
was not a thing, but myself and there is no destroying that
It was a chess match and I played both sides
knew every move before it happened
so rather than destruction, there was defeat
every filament of me, defeated
and now nothing is left is seems
nothing at all
nothing in this empty wasteland, this mechanical orb
but the clink, clink, clink, hammered fists that do not dent
hardly make a sound, hardly salve the fear
as you fight to survive the merry-go-rounds spinning and spinning
and you think that maybe time is without measure
no change marks its passage, but you tire
and tire and tire and tire and you believe
there is no escaping, no fleeing the fever dream...