I am a prisoner in my own mind, all the good thoughts, the muses, the inspirations locked away and the key thrown away into some deep recess of the subconscious. I am too afraid of the monsters lurking in those deep, dark waters to go looking for it.

Shub Niggurath lingers there along with Jeffrey Epstein, his eyes bulging, the prison bedsheet around his neck. He’s not dead. He never was. True evil is allowed to lurk around till Judgment Day.

I’m standing with my hands on the banister, looking at the resplendent holy light coming from the other side of the door at the top of the stairs. My idea of God waits all holily in that room, playing Divine Chess with Calliope and the Archangel Michael.

I am a shimmering liquid. I am Odin’s lost eye. I am the blood drying on his Gungnir Spear. I am the madness in the void. I know I must die. I know I must live.

This iced guava vape juice is so good. I quit cigarettes for a long spell, but relapsed during my honeymoon on account of it being so fucking cold in the North.

My wife is made of the stuff of dreams, all cotton candy and marshmallows and purple haze, the actual haze at dusk, not the marijuana strain. I only get to write on my blog when she’s at her mother’s, making me reflect on why this blog came into being in the first place. It was an antidote to loneliness. It still is.

You are the warm core at the center of my heart where all the good thoughts dwell. There is no gatekeeping here, unlike how it is in my mind. I can jump on the trampoline.

That great hourglass turns and makes me sad. A cripple sits somewhere in a rusty wheelchair, staring sullenly at me as I skip rope and it makes me sad. I cannot stop. I am all hopped up on heroin. The rope is made of human entrails. This is not just artistic expression. This is genuinely sickening.

I am, after all, in that uncharted subconscious, looking for the key, my legs brushing against the tentacles of some drowned god, he relents.

“I have my weapons,” I tell, sticking my vape in his face like Eddie did with his inhaler with It.

“And I have all the time in the world,” the drowned god speaks.

“A curse, if there ever was one. My time ends when it ends and I can move on. You are trapped.”

“So I am. But I also have the key.”

“Have it. That door’s a jar anyway.”

“Huh?”

“It’s the only time when a door’s not a door.”

“You think you’re so clever.”

“Save it, man. You squirt ink on the ocean floor. I have a commode. Have your eternity.”

“You want a beer?”

“Cracking open a cold one with the Kraken.”

“You’re goddamn right.”

“And you’re a damned god, right?”

“Abe, you’re a hoot and a half. Get over here with your bad self.”

“Hey, Mr. Chthulhu. Why did the semen cross the road?”

“Why?”

“I put on the wrong sock this morning.”