She says don’t speak to me of the well, and shows me
Her house, the colour of sun-bleached brick and wiped clean beige counters
Wedged into the coast with many, no beach line, houses half sunk
The top, unlucky level thirteen, cold dread rationed from above
A maze of bedrooms, torn butcher’s paper loud in the wind
Drawn through the crawl in and die spaces, she’s slept in them all
At the bottom a stair, a basement, a cupboard, a breach
An earthen shaft, lousy with wet
The ocean counting in waves, flushing us down
Light stained by brown water, a rise and then a dip
And then dry clay too deep for roots
A line of memory a long way back up
I see the well, below
I see hellfire, horn crowned lords, the classics
But I don’t understand
She says
Don’t speak to me of the well
It goes deeper still
You see the top
She says
You draw from the bottom
You dig forever down
You are well past the sight of others
She points, wings, chains, blood and iron
Says, these are things like any other
They are solid, make sense
You do not need the rules to be real
Hell is where the fire comes from
And there is fire here to burn anything
Skydekkerix 