She wore a butterfly, gold and trembling,
perched at the hollow of her throat,
where Amazing Grace drifted faintly,
like smoke from a dying candle.
Her nails, chipped with the color of regret,
clutched years she could never restore,
bloated on squandered time,
her body an elegy of famine and fire.

He stood in the shadow of her unraveling,
his gaze mapping the sharp terrain
of bony shoulders, brittle wrists—
a cartographer of her ruin.
His fingers whispered along her flesh,
as if tracing verses in invisible ink,
his words dissolving
in the cotton of her discarded dress.

How do you leave a woman
who is already half gone?
The butterfly quivers, the song falters,
and the keys fall silent in his hand.
Goodbye, he thinks, is not a word
but a weight
that neither of them can carry.

a smoldering haze,
the shadows coil,
speaking secrets untold.
she moves like a whisper
through the maze,
her hair wild,
the storm made flesh.

he waits, caught in the
stillness of longing,
reaching for her but
clutching the void.
every step forward
collapses into d i s t a n c e,
every gaze is a wound
that never heals.

time folds in on itself,
love becomes
a mirror that cracks
endlessly,
an ache without e n d,
a truth too r a w to hold.

Down here, in the belly of forgetting,
the walls chew us to pulp—
battery birds breaking their wings
against the bars of a silence
too loud to escape.

Love is a blade sharpened by whispers,
passed hand to hand—
friends carve their initials
into the soft of my back.
I taste the betrayal in their laughter,
bright and bitter
as a dying sun.

She said, “Take him,”
but I wanted no one.
This is the ritual of erasure:
the dance of ghosts
learning the weight of their absence.

Another blackout,
another convulsion of the soul.
I have seen my body revolt,
watched it crucify itself—
a lesson in sacrifice
no one asked to learn.

They call me shattered,
feed me the poison of their prescriptions.
“Fix yourself,” they say,
as if drowning is a cure.
Madness has learned the shape of me,
and now it fits like a second skin.

Hope is a liar
standing at the edge of my grief,
offering promises
she never means to keep.
Courage is a trickster,
a juggler of rage and ruin.

I pressed my hands together once,
but no god answered.
Only the echo of my suffering
returned,
swelling to fill their hunger
like cheap wine.

Now, I laugh—a feral thing
tearing at the carcass of dreams.
I sing to the darkness,
let it hold me close.
Sweet decay,
kiss my mouth until I am unmade.
Until even the stars
forget how to spell my name.