Out Of The Abyss Poem by Max Reif

The trap door opened.
I fell into the pit.

After ten days,
vacation was ending.

You know how it is:
a buffer zone,
stands between you
and the resumption
of mundane responsibilities,

and in that interlude you create
a magical kingdom and endow it with
the illusion of permanence.

Six days across the sea
of time till the boat
reaches the other shore,
it seems like an eternity —

but now, only two days left...
and now, it's tomorrow!

And after a mostly boring
last-hurran outing
to a nearby mountain-top,


the truth comes home:
this kingdom never was,
and now, even as an illusion,
it's about to end.

Mad with grief,
I come home from the mountain-top.
Snakes of conflict raging in my heart,
I go to bed —

The contradictions I wrestle with
render my life impossible.
The shrinking ground I stand on
will be gone tomorrow
like snow in warming sun.

The alternative to my
fortified, dissolving kingdom
is intolerable:
it means I'm a failure!

And yet, as I survey
the situation over and over,
the truth is inescapable:

no one is going
to buy and publish
my stories, art and poems
and make them my livelihood
in the next 24 hours.

I have to be satisfied
to be a creative vehicle
for the sake of the process,
for truth, and beauty
and my own need.

I have no
professional recognition.

But this fact left only
the horror of my 'day job',
latest in a lifetime
of day jobs.

How could I
do it any more?

Does God not care?
Are not all things possible?

I prayed, thankful for the steady
stream of pain
that guaranteed sincerity.
I prayed in a fever of prayer

for a long time, and I looked up
and found myself
still in the pit,
sheer walls all around,

and the numbers on
my digital clock
kept turning over.

I could not go,
I could not face tomorrow —

and then,
I took a step
back, somehow,

and I looked up again,
and I saw a ridiculous man
braying at the mirror!

Who am I
to give ultimatums
about what I will
and will not
accept from life?

That is the way
of madness.

I said to myself,
'God hears my prayers.
This must be
the way He wants it, '

and I said,
'I surrender any desire
to have it any different
than it is.'

Suddenly I was out of the pit,
with no more fevered obsession,
ready to lift my load tomorrow
all in a day's work.