Break in Contact

The swamp water settles around my tired knees.

A heavy silence hangs in the breathless trees.

I close my burning eyes just for a single beat,

Leaning on my rifle, dead on my feet.

A micro-sleep, a lapse, a cardinal sin,

And when I wake, the nightmare starts to spin.

The boots that marched ahead are suddenly gone.

A break in contact. I am completely alone.

Thirty endless days of this grueling hell,

Three hours of rest, a rotting, hollow shell.

One meal a day to fuel this breaking frame,

A ghostly pawn inside a brutal game.

My brain is melting, fraying at the edge,

My sanity teetering upon the ledge.

I listen for the squad, the heavy tread,

But hear a breathing in the dark instead.

It starts as a prickle against my neck,

A creeping dread I cannot hold in check.

I freeze in place, afraid to turn around,

Listening intently to every muffled sound.

The night vision goggles paint the world in green,

But cannot pierce the veil of the unseen.

There is a shadow moving at my back,

A silent hunter stalking through the black.

I step, and something mirrors my careful stride.

I stop, and it halts, with nowhere to hide.

The rucksack crushes down upon my spine,

While phantom shapes distort the tree line.

Is it the cadre? An enemy in the night?

Or just the hunger twisting up my sight?

My pulse is pounding, frantic in my ears,

Amplifying all my buried, primal fears.

I feel the static humming in the air,

The weight of an unrelenting, hollow stare.

It hovers inches from my sweating skin,

A waiting demon, a shadow born of sin.

I whip my head around, my weapon raised,

But nothing greets my vision, blurred and crazed.

Just hanging moss and vines like twisted threads,

A canopy of darkness overhead.

I face the front, and instantly it returns.

The phantom presence, the unseen gaze that burns.

It feeds upon the hollow in my gut,

The dragging boots, the eyes that will not shut.

The wind begins to whisper through the brush,

A sinister vibration in the midnight hush.

My fevered mind projects a monstrous face,

A lurking specter in this forgotten place.

I smell the damp earth, foul and deep,

A waking nightmare born of stolen sleep.

It wants my fear, it drinks my heavy dread,

It circles slowly round my spinning head.

I dare not run, I dare not even breathe,

I feel the unseen claws begin to unsheathe.

A snapping twig echoes like a thunder clap.

I stumble blindly in this shadowed trap.

Where is the patrol? Where is the guiding light?

I am swallowed by the belly of the night.

The presence presses closer to my spine,

A cold sensation, malevolent, malign.

It brushes past my shoulder in the damp,

Extinguishing the logic of the camp.

I turn again, and again find empty space.

Just the suffocating dark of this wretched place.

But still I know that I am not alone,

The unseen presence chills me to the bone.

With thirty days of starving in the mud,

The paranoia courses through my blood.

I walk into the void without a sound,

The ghost behind me pacing out the ground.

The forest watches, silent and severe,

As I become a vessel for the fear.