My earliest memory as a fledgling
was the subterranean musk of the cave
where the shadows danced.

It was there that we built
cigarette houses out of cataclysms and lost loves,
and learned the gematria of human cruelty.

I am a ghost in a prism
a stigmatist contemplating the transmutability of trauma.
My bones wax and weave into a yawning smog
where the gravity of shame keeps me in pseudocoma.

I am naked, eroding,
harnessing the frequency of shadow
to amalgamate blood to honey.