She sees herself slipping sideways, crawling out of frame—a fractured shadow laughing bitterly at the void. Split into two, three, a dozen hungry ghosts armed to the teeth, blades humming, flashing like neon sickness under a rotting sun. A chemical tang on the tongue—morphine dreams, sharp as razors, as bitter as the lies she whispers to herself, again and again and again. Agreement? No chance. Agreement's a dead language.

The streets are jagged veins, carved by desperate hours and desperate hands. The past crashes through like a ****** in withdrawal, clawing at her skin, digging for some fragile vein of meaning. The chosen ones scatter like cigarette ash into the unbreathable air. Truth burns. Doubt screams. Nobody wins this game.

She’s disgraced, sure, but truth is her leash. She’s got the numbers—counts the dead, calculates the weight of significance in a world slipping off its axis. Oracle burned to ash by her own prophecy, she's got secrets to sell. Whispers futures into the ears of corpses. Hands groping through the static for some code, some cipher. Eyes wide, empty. Blind.

The labyrinth pulls her deeper, silken threads unraveling into something monstrous, writhing roots, tangles of anxiety choking the air. Confess! she commands, spitting venom. Purity’s a joke told by the ******, a punchline you find only when the blade's in your hand. But she’s reaching anyway, clawing at enlightenment like it owes her something, like despair’s got an answer hiding in the filth. Flowers bloom red in the cracks, ecstasy spilling like blood, too much, too fast, choking.

Blood pools where the flow stops. Stagnant. She swallows herself, folds into nothing. The mirror devours her whole, spitting back echoes, endless recursion, hysteria blooming in the cracks. Scream trapped, caught, reflected infinitely. A Möbius strip of despair, looping forever, cutting deep, deeper still.

No exit. Just mirrors. Just screams.

You took my pulse,
Unraveled it, thread by thread,
Until the spool of my years
Sat empty in your hand.
Your lies came like tides,
Swollen with the moon’s silver pull,
Rushing in, foaming and gnashing,
To drown the fragile towers
I carved from sand.

I hate you—
The way I hate sharp things
That beckon with promise of release,
The way I hate mirrors,
Winking their cruel truths at dawn.
If I could wield my loathing
Like a blade,
I’d etch your betrayal into your skin.

But still, it is me who bleeds,
Me who swallows the salt
Of your restless seas.
You, the storm, the tide,
The cruel rhythm
That broke the best years of my life
Against your jagged rocks.

Now, the castles we dreamed
Crumble in the clouds,
Their ghostly spires spiraling upward—
Untouchable, unreachable.
And I, a husk,
Stand knee-deep in the wreckage,
Knowing that even the moon
Mocks my rage,
Unchanged by the chaos
You left behind.

Tumbling down the jagged scream of rocks,
the star on his chest buried under the rubble of decades,
shattered constellations scatter like ash over asphalt—
who's left to testify to the night’s betrayal?
Fair and faithful are words for the dead,
roadkill philosophies smeared across highways of hunger,
dreamers flattened under the wheels of endless inquiry—
truth a bent nail in the coffin of questions,
Morse code flickers from insomnia’s windows,
each blink a lifeline—each pause a funeral.

I’ve seen you hiding, all of you,
hands trembling behind curtains, eyes darting like shadows,
your lips whispering confessions to ghosts.
Who are you running from?
Who waits at the end of your tethered silence?

Secrets grow like vines in the throat of the city,
tangling the breath of poets, prophets, and junkies.
Not sleeping, not dreaming, not blinking,
we shuffle through cracked streets,
faces blurred like old Polaroids burned by time’s indifference.

Forever waiting, forever watching—
reality unfolds not as a revelation but as a wound,
spilling truths we don’t want to see,
smearing light across the dark canvas of our fears.

Listen to the static hum of the night,
to the machines breathing for us when we can not.
There’s no answer in the Morse code,
only the pulse of absence,
only the signal of a world unraveling itself,
one starlit fragment at a time.

escape(wake)
by not-these-hands
(a metronome-of-thoughts)

facesglued //
to the(wall)all(talking)—at once;
witchesarguing  theirselvesbloodshattering
(not my fingers-on-the-trigger
but oh the bulletssscreamingmyname)

i cannot move
(is this asleep-or-awake?)
//paralyzed feet//(paralyzed hands)
&shewasonfireESCAPEwake—

the fields are a maze //crop-circle scars//
—journeysdark,deepsearching(purpose)—
shatter:
everything (silence
sCREAM)

escape–wake//escape—wake
butwhereisheaven?
wake.

red stains on the cup,
her lips' ghost,
a scarlet trace,
porcelain whispers,
no words,
no soft goodbyes left—
just silence to fill the
v
    o
  i
d.

He was more than a granddad to me. He was a father, a god—a complex, towering figure of contradictions, both tender and tyrannical. For us children, but especially for me, he always had an endless well of patience. Even though he was cruel, I craved his love and attention like sunlight. Today is his birthday. Though he's passed on to some other corner of the universe, I believe we'll meet again someday.

I remember Boxing Day, his birthday, when the family would gather with all their arguments in tow. The day felt like an extension of Christmas but held its own distinct magic. We would set the table together, sometimes cooking, though often simply reheating the leftovers from the day before. It was chaotic, noisy, and unforgettable. Amidst the tumult, there was his steady presence, his pride in orchestrating it all.

He loved to see the children a little tipsy, and it was under his watchful, proud gaze that I had my first sip of alcohol. That memory stays with me—the warmth of the drink, the warmth of his approval. There would always be arguments, loud and raw, but they seemed to be part of the ritual, almost expected, as though his home couldn't contain so many clashing lives without them.

At the end of the night, he’d quiet the room and hand out white envelopes filled with money to all the children. He’d say, “This will be my last year. Next time I won’t be with you.” We laughed it off year after year, not believing him until, bittersweetly, it finally was true. The last Boxing Day without him was empty, a void none of us could fill.

I remember the other parts of him too—the early mornings steeped in black coffee and tobacco smoke, his smart clothing paired incongruously with bare feet. The room of chattering birds where I tried, and failed, to save baby chicks fallen from their nests. The way he shared his thoughts with me, thoughts too heavy for most ears, his doubts and even his regrets. How he once admitted, without flinching, brutal honesty only he could deliver.

He was cruel, especially to women, but never to me until the end when he insisted I had grown fat. With me, he was different, softer. He made me feel safe and protected, even when his anger made others shrink away. He was always fixing things—clocks, kettles, whatever was broken—and growing herbs and flowers with a care that seemed almost out of place in his hands. Those same hands, gentle in one moment, could be brutal in the next, quick to strike my grandmother or anyone who crossed him.

And yet, I more than respect him. I miss him. He was a role model, flawed and difficult, but mine. When I came to him homeless with my own child in my arms, he didn’t hesitate to take us in. He gave me a place where I could rest, where I could breathe.

His life was a mess of contradictions—love and anger, gentleness and violence, pride and regret. But he was my granddad, my father, my god. And I loved him for all of it.

The branches lattice beneath her, black veins
etching the earth's sallow skin. She lies
as if pinned, a moth, the ground
opening its throat to devour her whole.

The trees, thin-limbed and aching, lean in,
their shadows like fingerprints
on her bare thighs. He is above her,
a dark weight, his breath thick
as the stench of iron. Crooked teeth
graze her tender insides, his mouth
a cavern of rot. Her chipped nails catch
on his skin, splintering her last defense—
each struggle a hymn he hums through his teeth.

The bass thumps in the distance,
a pulse too far to save her. His rhythm
is sharper, faster, a saw grinding
through the fragile architecture
of her. Her pelvis cracks beneath
his thrusts, her fragility undone,
his pleasure oozing into her wounds.

Before this—before him—there was the Dragon.
Silver foil unfolded like a revelation,
blue smoke crawling through her lungs,
its touch an anesthetic hymn. She exhaled
herself into nothingness, a slip of a girl,
a husk, unseeing. Vulnerability etched itself
into her marrow. The trees,
silent anatomists, catalogued her surrender.

Now, she is a secret the earth consumes,
her body a whisper the soil licks clean.
The trees will remember the taste of her,
their roots tangled in her hair, their leaves
swaying with the rhythm of her fall.
No one else will know—
only the trees, their mouths sealed with bark,
their witness as still and eternal as stone.

Chop, chop, chop. The marionette slumps, and I’m left holding the blade, sticky with the residue of years. Family? A loose construct. A rotting scaffolding propped up by shared scars and the thinnest thread of blood. They weren’t people—they were collectors. Hoarders of anger, archivists of hurt. They fed on it, bled for it, distilled it into a toxin they called love. I drank it until my veins swelled, until the comatose hum was the only sound I knew.

Their lies were iron bars, their truths blunt objects. They didn’t whisper—they shouted, fists slamming bets on the underdog. "He’ll crack," they said, "too small, too soft." They didn’t count on the dog biting back, didn’t see the will buried beneath the scars.

And the scars—purple, thick, obscene. Skin turned leather under fire. A graft job, patched together with pain and necessity. They thought they’d burned me to ash, but ash has its uses. It fertilizes. It grows things.

Now I’m moving forward, past their circus of anger and blood, past the puppeteer’s stage. The road hums under me, neon signs flashing promises that aren’t real, but maybe they don’t have to be. The truth? There isn’t one. Just will. Just the drive toward some distant point of light. Peace isn’t handed out. You take it. You keep it. And maybe, just maybe, it keeps you too.