Lend Me Your Light – Lindsay Temple

October 16, 2021

this is a culmination of realities. if you can dream it, you can be it, lest the abstractions and demonic seduction of unconsciousness consume you first. the sweet pastel drippings of your temporal lobe steeps your mind in pleasure, stretching over the lies you force upon yourself in your waking hours. there is a rupture. everything is fine, here. soft and quiet, you slip beyond the in-between, and find yourself cradled by ego death. you touch the fear and watch it transfigure itself into visions of distortion, into forcefields of static, into dismembered hands reaching for you beneath your infantile rest, into old photos strewn across the floor.

be careful, or you might pass into a punishing slumber. everything is still fine, yes, even if it’s terrorizing and unrepentantly fucked. once your REM cycle finds its way to its natural end, you’ll realize that you were never sleeping in the first place, only sitting straight up in the bed, underneath a spotlight for hours on end, your paranoias and repulsive truths projected on the wall above your head. your imagination chug-chug-chugs along, shrouded in mystique and a clever little fugue state, a culture influenced by benzodiazepines. come back to bed with me.

comfort has ceased to be an option, though you still crave a penetrative rest. before you climb onto your pathetic, sweat-soaked mattress, you prop the front door open, praying that God’s peace will float into your home and invade your maniacal insomnia. he never comes.

desperate times call for desperate measures. in the mezzanine between wakefulness and slumber, you throw out all your belongings, convinced that your material reality is impeding you from bathing in a purifying oasis of simmering unconsciousness. all that remains are your shrink-wrapped refrigerator and the scrawlings of a demonic manifesto on the walls, urging you to turn from your wicked ways, from the rancid, charred, fleshly urge to flee from the fetid daylight into a creamy, butter-poached dormancy.

dirge and delight, blistered bliss, tulle and toil. crystalline waters crash over you under the dazzling sun. the supple, warm body of a young woman lies underneath you on the shore; you weep over her dionysian beauty. tenderly caressing her breast, you thank the Lord On High for delivering you from the madness of paralyzing sleeplessness. the loving oasis has finally come.

lifting your eyes to meet hers, you notice the depth of their blackness, the color of her pupils bursting and overflowing. the world has turned its back on you again. the vision of her nudity terrifies you as the siren relentlessly shrieks and screeches, your ears bleeding with integrity. her body, the hellmouth back into the chthonic and restless inferno. your mattress is aflame, your ears ringing, your tongue mute. you pound your fist in the same spot on the wall, waiting for God to emancipate you, please. He never does.