Manias Rising

It begins with a walk,
but the street is a ribbon of mercury,
and your shoes dissolve into wings.
Each step hums like a tuning fork,
the air thick with whispers of speed.

Then the trot,
bones bending into branches,
lungs blooming like crimson flowers.

Then the dash,
a storm breaking inside your veins,
time peeling away in silver flakes.
Most stop at the corner,
but some keep running
until the horizon folds
into a mirror of sweat and steel.

The gym becomes an odiferous temple,
its mirrors shimmering like liquid moons.
Bodies kneel before dumbbell altars,
counting reps like prayer beads,
each clang a sermon to the god of symmetry.
Muscles swell like ripe fruit,
then split as ligaments snapping like violin strings,
the body a broken instrument still humming for more.

And then…

The numbers arrive,
marching like glass soldiers across the mind’s horizon.
Roulette wheels spin in the chest,
dice rattle in the lungs,
and every heartbeat is a coin tossed into
a bottomless wishing well.

Hospitals bloom like
white poppies in the desert,
their petals whispering: the house always wins.

Finally, the paradox: Love,
that velvet blade.
A modest sip of its cut
and the world hums in color
And flood the veins with it,
leaving the heart to become
a chandelier of broken glass.

Yet…

There’s the twist
when the shards fall.
They do not cut;
but bloom into wings
giving the body rise,
weightless into a sky
where obsession is
just another name for flight.

Awakening…

I ask: when you glide into that sky,
will you ever want to land?