THE BOTTOMLESS PIT OF PLEASURE

First, you have to possess another kind of pit. A pit unseen except in nightmares. A pit developed along the cracks and fissures of a long-forgotten childhood. A pit that manifests in unexpected ways… an innocuous swirl in the pattern of a carpet that sucks you in while in the middle of a social gathering… a word someone says that hangs in the air like a black hole ready to swallow anything that comes near… a basement door kept shut by the forced repetition of anxious thoughts when there is, in fact, no basement beneath the house, only a concrete slab.

First you have to know that kind of pit. Then we can talk. We can talk about the worrisome state of relationships. Or the lack of external dialogue. Or the perpetual feeling of incompletion. It’s not easy being a conscious human being without the maps we find in convenience stores to guide us. So, we turn to what’s missing on the grocery shelves.

The bottomless pit of pleasure… which has many a dimpled recess and warm wet hole to enter but only one escape. The bottomless pit of pleasure might feed a seemingly harmless addiction but like an hourglass stood on end one pit eventually seeps into the other and all secrets are revealed.

The beauty eventually wears out and what happens next is not pretty.

The heat that warms your face also burns your insides, until one night you wake up with a hacking cough and find gray ash smeared across your lips.

Don’t forget the moments when it feels like there’s a hook in your heart and you don’t know how it got there. Perhaps you were born with it and it gets dislodged from time to time. The hook itself is harmless, but it leads you to places you don’t want to go.

Sound familiar? If so, you’ve been lying to yourself all these years.

I know, because I live inside those nightmares. I’m the swirl that catches your eye. I’m the black spots in the air that spell insanity. I’m the one rattling the basement door, prying it open just enough to let in the cracks. Your mother may have given birth to your body but I’m the one who fractured the egg of your mind and let the yoke spill out.

Listen to me, son. I gave you that pit. That pit of disillusion that disguises itself as a bouquet of blood-red roses. That pit of distrust that welcomes you, home after a long day of pretending to be everyone’s dog on a leash. 

That deep chasm of hurt that never fills no matter how many times you stuff it full of feel-good nuggets mined from the flesh caves of desire.

The bottomless pit of pleasure. The bottomless pit of pain. Take your pick. Like the two of us, they’re one in the same.

Kurt Newton’s writings can be found festering in such places as God’s Cruel Joke, Punk Noir Magazine, Apocalypse Confidential, Urban Pigs Press, Cajun Mutt Press, Hobo Camp Review, and Heroin Love Songs. His recent collections include Moonlight Apocrypha, The Body Snatchers & Other Death Rituals, animals, The Ever-Evolving Alphabet, and A Troubled Sleep.