A Lantern in the Abyss

Light bends like origami thoughts
in depths where darkness
wears its own shadow as skin,
and void drinks void
from chalices made of compressed eternities.

The lantern swings,
pendulum-heart keeping time
with the pulse of impossible stars,
its flame speaking in tongues
of liquid aurora and molten dreams.

Here, in the throat of nothing,
where pressure turns memories to diamonds
and regrets grow scales,
the light carves geometries
that shouldn’t exist —
fractals of almost-hope
blooming like coral made of dawn.

Depth is measured in whispers,
each fathom deeper than the last
until numbers forget their names
and mathematics dissolves
into poetry written in gravity’s tears.

Around the lantern’s glow,
abyssal creatures wear masks
made from forgotten constellations,
their eyes reflecting universes
where darkness never learned
how to fear the light.

Time flows sideways,
thick as mercury,
while quantum fish swim
through probability clouds,
their fins cutting windows
into parallel presents
where different versions of you
learned to breathe water
made of crystallized silence.

The lantern’s glass
holds captive a flame
that remembers when fire
was still learning to dance,
its light tasting of copper
and the space between heartbeats.

In this drowning dark,
where pressure turns thoughts to pearls,
the lantern swings eternal —
a compass needle pointing toward
whatever direction hope
decided to become.

And somewhere far above,
or perhaps within,
surface is just another word
for the boundary between
what we fear to know
and what we know to fear.

Yet still the light persists,
painting shadows with colors
that exist only in the dreams
of blind deep-sea prophets,
while the abyss itself
learns to sing
in frequencies of illuminated doubt.