Challenger Deep

By Rachel Curtis

You need to find a place where the light won’t reach
There is no truer friend than where travelers come to meet
An end, a beginning
Fear departs with breathing in the challenger deep.

Do you want to know it? Do you know what it is that I cannot speak of?
I have had the most fantastic dreams, since before your heart learned to beat
with me.
Let me share in you, my mysteries.
Let your aching body sleep on the seabed in challenger deep.

You can be anything in darkness that complete.
Your body invisible, weightless, non-existing, except as the tether to your soul
Free-diving,
Your mind the only reality, undisturbed, except by what imagination conjures
The random colors and circles of a mind freed
From every sensuality.
Loose your weary mind in the challenger deep.

The silence will find you if you think quietly.
Even the heaviest sighs are bubbles to me,
Your metal shells drift like sea jellies
Your wildest cries, a conch echoing
The sound I first created, that roars from the underbelly
You can scream into the challenger deep.

Heat bleeds from the gashes creation cut in me..
My life would flow out forever if it were not for the pressure that cages me
Sustains me, the challenger deep.

Are we not so different?

You turn your eyes to the wide-open expanses and look for a god in the
greatness.
I am an abyss—too much life goes unnoticed in my vastness.
I have not the eyes to gaze on it all.
Meaning perishes forever and settles like dust in my palms.
What a terrible thing is time in a place where you are free only to circulate!
Here in the challenger deep.

Secrets are first birthed here, in challenger deep.
They live and die without discovery.
Any tear you could cry has already flowed in me
I drown of weeping.

Perish together and live forever where the darkness speaks,
Meet me here in the challenger deep.