Dragged Under

Thursday, February 20, 2025

There’s a moment between resistance and surrender—when exhaustion sets in, and the current takes what’s left. This piece is about that moment. The fight against overwhelming forces, the chaos of survival, the weight of everything unseen but felt. It’s about drowning, not just in water, but in time, memory, fate.

Paired with a visual that distorts the horizon itself, this is the descent. The collapse. The reckoning.

Pull (a poem)

Don’t be afraid.
The walk across these waters—
winds and waves, crags and rocks,
razor cuts, jagged teeth,
puncture and penetrate.
The riptide and tow,
the drag on me, out.

Exhausted,
fighting the current,
watching the days left fall away.

The distance. The panic. The thrashing.
The madness of a drowning victim,
attacking the would-be saviors.
The scramble to survive,
overriding all logic.

Treading—
turned tragic fit,
thrown out,
survival’s last bit of grit.

A gasp. A hint. An assurance.
Anxiety overpowers
before strength is gone.

The long fall for a toppled ego.
I’m powerless.

Good God.

To traverse the sea—
and mid-voyage, lose the craft.
A vast, icy ocean.
Shark-infested waters.
No life vests.

The void swallows the cries,
a dead sound,
a moot moan to be spared,
falling on divine ears—deaf.

By providence,
who’s next to visit
the Master of Puppets?

An iron sky.
A dome.
Lifting me up,
failing to maintain.

The system crashes.
The soul capsized.

Just on the other side,
traumatized,
buried,
and now you wanna talk about my lack.

Or review the five decades I had—
in that ghetto,
terra firma,
excommunicado,
ejected.

The collapse of breath,
an effort to breathe
met with sludge,
impossible to aspirate.

Fade to black.

Remember me, babe.

The heaviness in my chest,
the weight of your standing—
without.

All their faces
before my eyes.

Closing Thoughts

The image and poem work in tandem—fractured reality, drowning in forces beyond control. There is no resolution, no clear savior. Just the weight of the moment, the pull, the inevitability. Is it struggle? Surrender? Or simply the way things go?

Let it sit with you. Let it take you under. :)