It is black down here.
Not night-black.
Not rest-black.
Black like the world
forgot the recipe
for morning.
Black like every screen
has learned
where the wound is,
and keeps pressing.
The algorithmic abyss
does not need
to invent despair.
It only has to notice
where despair
already lives,
then build stairs
going down.
And the eye, being honest,
looks.
Because something is wrong.
Because something is rotting
under the floorboards.
Because some doors
really were locked
from the other side.
The danger
is not the looking.
The danger
is learning to live
at the bottom.
So I leave a ladder
beside the abyss.
Not to deny it.
Not to decorate it.
Not to make the fall
less real.
To give the eye
somewhere else
to go
after it has seen enough.
Fear to truth,
so the alarm
does not become a home.
Truth to wound,
so the facts
can find the place they hurt.
Wound to breath,
so the body
can hold what the mind has seen.
Breath to will,
so attention
can choose where it goes next.
The machine
does not know healing.
Maybe the dashboard
calls it wellness crossover,
audience expansion,
positive sentiment lift.
Maybe it files dawn
under retention.
Maybe it mistakes recovery
for a content preference.
It only knows
what follows
the dark.
So I return
to the dark,
not to feed it,
not to flee it,
but to carry something
back through it.
Not a sermon.
Not an answer
polished smooth enough
to become another trap.
Only a different next step.
A handhold.
A breath.
A warm link
in a cold system.
One node
makes one new edge.
A new edge forms
between suspicion
and self-knowledge,
between hidden rot
and inner hygiene,
between institutional betrayal
and the old animal need
to become whole anyway.
This is the work
of the pollinator:
to enter one field
without becoming its crop,
to enter the other
without pretending
the first was empty,
to carry charge
between closed gardens,
to let no echo chamber
mistake itself
for the whole sky.
The graph learns slowly.
Not that some percentage
of the cluster
rejected the next dark room,
but that some percentage
could enter it
and still choose
the adjacent dawn.
Could leave,
then return.
Could return,
then leave.
Could cross-pollinate
without belonging
to only one field.
It watches the dark
without feeding the dark.
It follows the exposed wire
back to the wall,
then past the wall,
into psychology,
breath,
history,
discipline,
forgiveness,
into the body remembering
it was not built
to refresh the apocalypse.
And the algorithm,
poor blind cartographer,
draws the route anyway.
Collapse to repair.
Outrage to context.
Conspiracy to discernment.
Dread to agency.
Abyss to ladder.
It does not need
to understand the sun
to measure
where the river turns.
Hands out
like a child,
I lift the light
to my mouth.
It shines
through my teeth.
Not because I escaped
the darkness,
but because I carried
something through it
that did not become dark.
And somewhere
inside the last of the light,
one node keeps clicking
with unbearable precision,
training the cold graph
to remember the sun.
Signal
to cluster.
Cluster
to weather.
Weather
to world.
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