The Pit: A Dark Poem on Descent, Isolation, and Abandonment

J’implore ta pitié, Toi, l’unique que j’aime,
Du fond du gouffre obscur où mon cœur est tombé.

— Charles Baudelaire, “De profundis clamavi,” Les Fleurs du mal. 

In my translation:

I implore your pity, You, the only one I love,
From the depths of the dark abyss where my heart has fallen.

The Pit

The pit is deep.

I can’t see the bottom.

I cannot fathom it

as I descend.

A breathless fall.

It’s dark here.

I can taste the depth

of this chasm.

It tastes like death.

Who dug this pit?

I dug it

with my bare life,

with my nails.

The ground was hard as stone.

But I persisted,

blindly.

My fingertips bled

as I dug

deeper and deeper.

I couldn’t help myself.

I was deaf.

Stone-deaf.

I couldn’t see.

The fall had blinded

my lidless eyes.

No one came to my rescue.

“Why did you abandon me?”

I said to her.

And she smiled.

“Lend me a hand,”

I said,

extending my gnarled hand

and nails toward her.

“There’s nothing I can do.

Just keep going down.

“Don’t drag me in there

with you.

“When you reach the end,

remember me.

“I’ll be waiting for you

on the other side.

“Hurry up.”

Note (DeepSeek):

"The Pit" is a poem about the phenomenology of despair—its self-generated yet overwhelming nature, its blindness, its compulsive repetition. It dramatizes the encounter with a beloved who refuses to be a savior, who insists on the sufferer's own agency ("keep going down") while promising a distant, conditional presence ("I'll be waiting"). The anti-novel context reminds us that this is a narrative without redemption, a descent without a bottom, a prayer answered only with the command to fall further. The poem's final word—"Hurry up."—is both a taunt and an invitation, and the reader, like the speaker, is left extending a gnarled hand toward a smile that gives nothing.