Tango With a Whirling Dervish

In the depths of a jungle

Inside a ramshackle hut with rat-scuttling rafters

A man sweats in the darkness

Consumed by fever

Too restless to lie down

Too weak to sit up

From mosquito bite did the dilemma show

Or was it the rat nibbling on his toe?

Causation matters not in the throes

Of a headspace that threatens madness

And permanent dis-ease

A perverse symbiosis burrows insidiously

The arrival of a spirit relentless and invasive

Cavorting with every cell

Twisting in disturbing arrangements

Contorting to the brink of breaking

This fever saturates his marrow

His eyeballs are now drums

For a cacophony of crazed drummers

Teeth grinding, sweat pouring

The next pound could crack his forehead right open

Each eye movement sends psychedelic flashes strobing

Unnerving canvases of disjointed colour and pattern

Muscles throb as though churning through a meat grinder

Panic intensifies the fever

Relaxation a concept of the most fantastical daydream

Reluctantly, the man concedes

Dengue demands it

Yet surrender delivers a curious thing

A headspace remiss of consequence

Free from resistance to discomfort

The avoidance of uncomfortable situations

Invites insatiable demons over the threshold

Resistance is a magnet

A magnate for the acquisition of nightmares

To exist beyond the dream space

Strength surges in vulnerability

Liberation lush when control relinquished

Dance in the fever

In urgency, in pain, in disease

Or it will consume everything

Belching shadow realities that cast a dreary haze

Over that pulsating light that is always there

No matter how disease besieges

In the depths of a jungle

Inside a rickety rat-infested hut

A man lies motionless

Too mentally exhausted to form thought

Too physically tired to move

An enforced meditation

Endows a luxury of doing nothing

No guilt required

Moments of clarity fall like dewdrops in the nothingness

Rippling insight

This man has always had a fever

An urgency veiled under the guise of ambition

Blighted by the need for instant gratification

An urgency to get somewhere

To achieve something

This fever dismantles the need to be anything at all

It strips until there is nothing left

For this man is all he needs to be

At all times

And that missing piece

The one for which he’s been searching for years

It was always there