Escape

I sweep my cheek across cold cement

languishing in a search for hope

beyond the slit beneath the door.

The window is blocked by thick metal bars.

Everything is dark. The night is colder by the second.

The tips of my fingers press against the thin cracks

inspecting the frightened scribbles for any imperfection

anything that can help.

I swing my fists wildly against the door.

I yell and cry and shriek

until there is no force that will coerce

resonance from my raw throat.

But... what's that? A light? Could someone have heard me?

Bobbing up and down, it approaches.

But there is no hand grasping the handle of a lamp.

No figure illuminated by the light.

The mote is a pure white glow with unnerving

weightlessness emitting a light that overexposes the trees.

The leaves are scattered black smudges easily disintegrated

by the light.

The trunks are slowly enveloped from both sides.

Then it's as if they're gone.

There is no form visible with which to declare it exists.

With the mote's continued approach

the once thick bars of the window become thin

as the extreme light wraps white around the black edges

until the solid black lines are nothing but toothpicks.

I push against them and they snap.

Then crawl out into the soft gradient of dark

becoming light.

From outside I can see that the forest is flecked

with a multitude of these motes.

As if an absent artist dropped a paint soaked brush

and the flecks multiplied into a cosmic starscape.

But I have come too close to the stars.

I am becoming thin.

Now they are stealing away my edges. 

Perhaps the room was not a prison.

I reach out with what are now black skeletal hands

attempting to claw out an existence in the consuming white abyss.

My canvass is painted white.