A fractal elegy for the age of unraveling

Ten Meditations in Mirrorfall
(A Dual Cycle)

Before the Frame Fails

This was never meant to hold.
It was always two voices,
speaking across the echo.

One forgets gently.
One laughs too late.
Neither is whole.

Together, they vibrate.

You may read this as memory.
Or debris.
Or a map scribbled by collapse itself.

Don’t search for resolution.
This isn’t a conclusion.
It’s a frame caught in the act of breaking.

GRAVITY WAS NEVER GENTLE
Five Meditations in Minor Key

I. THE PLUNGE

There is a place
where orbits die

not with fire,
but with forgetting.

The circle breaks.
The rhythm fractures.

Gravity
stops pretending
to be kind.
It shreds.
It consumes.
It opens a throat
where light
cannot scream.

Matter plunges.
Not falling,
but unbecoming.

Like a thought
too dense
to escape
its own weight.

Like a soul
that outlived its name
and couldn’t find another.

Time snags,
like torn silk.

Space frays,
until even silence
forgets itself.

All your clever math
unlearns itself.

The compass spins.
The stars
abandon their script.

And still,
at the lip
of this unmaking,
something burns:

a last defiance,
a dying frequency,
a signal

not of despair,
but of what
refused
to dissolve.



II. THE LIBRARY BEFORE THE HORIZON

In a starless region
past the last mapped orbits
there was a library
that catalogued only the thoughts of things
moments before they ceased to exist.

The librarian
was not a man,
nor a machine,
but a kind of question.

A kind that echoes
in unlit rooms
and makes philosophers
speak softer.

It recorded
the panic of particles,
the elegies
of evaporating comets,
the regrets
of space junk,

and most recently
the final reflections of matter
caught in the plunging region
of a black hole.

Each thought
arrived like a whisper
folded in heat:

«I was spinning.
I was spinning.
Why did I stop?»

«Was this the center
  or the end?»

«Who lit this trap
  with such beautiful equations?»

«Did my spin ever matter?»

«Will any body remember my mass (asking for a friend)?»

Visitors were rare.
One arrived,
with philosophy on his shoulders
and poetry in his gaze.
A walking existential crisis.

He asked:
«Will this library vanish too?»

The librarian replied:
«We are the echo
that outlives the voice.
The reading
is how we haunt.»

Then offered the visitor
a cup of theoretical coffee.

It did not exist.
But it was warm.


III. THE GIFT SHOP AT THE END OF TIME

Welcome.
Please, exit through the singularity.

Yes, we’re still open.
No, we don’t accept time
as currency anymore.

Our shelves hold:

ceramic echoes
fossilized maybes
a music box
playing Cherenkov radiation
labeled «The Blue Note of Singularity»

t-shirts that read:
«Souvenir of Non-Existence»

There’s a snow globe
of the early universe.
Shake it
and watch inflation
run in reverse.

(Children giggle.)
(Physicists weep.)

A vending machine glows faintly.
Insert 3.99 regrets for last thoughts:

«Wait, that was it?»
«What if I tried harder?»
«Does absence have a weight?»
«Is there a restroom?»

Behind the counter
stands a clerk
made of obsolete constants.

He hums in Planck time
and speaks
in discontinued units.

Everything must go,
he says,
sweeping particles
into the clearance bin.

Someone buys a postcard
of a black hole.

«Wish you were here,
but you’re not.
And maybe
you never were.»


IV. THE LOST AND FOUND OF THE MULTIVERSE

Down a hallway
that curves in eleven dimensions
past broken signs
and rewound clocks
there is a room
that waits
for timelines
that slipped away.

The air smells like
white noise
and maybe ozone
and maybe old books.

A sign reads:
«Please claim only what was always yours.»

Inside:

one left shoe
from a life
where you ran

a child’s drawing
from the Earth
where you said yes

dust
clinging to almost-spoken words:
«I love you too»
«I’m sorry»
«I’m not sure I believe»

A woman moves through the shelves
wrapped in layers of herself.
Each version hums a song
no one wrote
but she knows by heart.

A small box trembles.
Its label:
«The life you almost lived.»

It pulses irregularly
leaking light
that refuses to explain.

The clerk has no face
just hands
that ask:

«Would you like to claim?
Or leave something behind?»

You nod.
Or don’t.

The door closes
before you decide
if you were ever real enough
to leave anything behind.


V. THE EXIT THAT NEVER OPENS

This is the place
where endings gather
when they forget
how to end.

The door says EXIT.
But when you reach it
it becomes a mirror
then a sigh
then absence.

Time does not flow here.
It breathes inward
like smoke
curling in memory’s lungs.

On the walls:
projections of futures
that didn’t choose you.

One waves.
One vanishes.
One turns away.

You ask
(or think you ask)
if I go
where does the going end?

The room answers
by not answering.

In the center
a staircase spirals both ways.

Each step is etched with:
a page number from the Library
a price tag from the Gift Shop
a fragment from the Lost and Found

A child once tried to count them.
She is still here.
Very wise.
Very bored.

Light spills
through a crack
in the concept of closure.

Something ancient
touches your shoulder.

Not permission
but reminder:

You never fit.
That was never your failure.
That was the door.

You nod.
But the nod loops.
It always did.

You were always
already leaving.

The door was never the point.
Only the leaning.
Only the weight
before the absence.



*THE SEAM*

[interruption // trace bleed detected]
you were supposed to turn the page  
    —  
        or maybe  
            you did  
             but  
    gravity

      skipped.
voice:  “ you’ve already heard this ”
~
echo: [static]
                               \  “ not.    like.    this. ”
. . . . .
         the loop frays

                a side shifts  
            the frame folds inward  
        echo. misfired.  
you are in
the
se _
                                                                ­      
                                          /CALCULATING COLLAPSE/  
                                                 echo² = silence × witness  
                                                   → solved for witness:  
                                                    wi­tness = echo² / silence  
                                                       ­  (error: division by zero)  
                                                    → solved for silence:  
                                                     silence = echo² / witness  
                                                       ­   (error: witness not found)  
                                                     → solved for echo:  
                                                     echo = ±√(silence × witness)  
                                                      ­     (output: [void])  

       witness?

            no

  message?

          not anymore
something
not you
is remembering you.

and for a moment  
you ache  
not for answers  
but for touch.

_


GRAVITY WAS NEVER SERIOUS
Five Meditations in Comic Key

I. THE PLUNGE

There is a place where orbits drop the script. Not with fire, but with collective existential apathy. The circle says, «I can’t even.» Rhythm takes a coffee break.
Gravity? Please. It’s just your anxious ex, trying to keep you close.
Matter doesn’t fall. It calls in sick, like your last neuron trying to explain tax returns. Like a soul that signed up for enlightenment but got stuck in a customer service loop.
Time extends its deadline indefinitely. Space wrinkles like a badly folded map.
Your physics professor weeps into a chalkboard.
The universe turns to you and asks: « Did you bring snacks? »
At the event horizon, something still vibrates  - not with meaning, but with the leftover buzz of the cosmic microwave. Afterburner reheating existence.


II. THE LIBRARY BEFORE THE HORIZON

In a zip code so remote, not even metaphors deliver. There a library archives the last internal monologues of collapsing matter.
Its newest acquisition: a neutron’s breakup playlist. It’s mostly Radiohead.
The librarian is an anxious paradox that forgets why it walked into the room.
It shelves questions like: «Was I ever meaningful? », «Did my orbit look good from a distance?» , «Did Hawking mention me by name?»
When asked if the library itself would survive, it shrugged in Unicode and offered a lukewarm beverage labeled « 42 percent Certainty -  Now With Foam ».
Reading here is free. Interpreting? That costs your last illusion.


III. THE GIFT SHOP AT THE END OF TIME

Welcome to the only shop where «Everything Must Go» is not a sale. It’s a timeline.
Top picks: DIY Black Hole Starter Kit (batteries imploding), Entropy-flavored chewing gum, t-shirts that read «Ask Me About My Temporal Displacement », a souvenir spoon from the edge of time.
There’s a bobblehead of Schrödinger. It is both nodding and not.
A hologram gently whispers: This aisle no longer exists.
The clerk used to be a theorem. Now he’s just a vibe.
Receipts vanish before you can ask for them. But one always floats back with the words: You were here. Or at least… something like you was.


IV. THE LOST AND FOUND OF THE MULTIVERSE

Located somewhere between déjà vu and mild panic.
Lost items include: the socks you blamed on the dryer (they joined a rebellion), a future where you learned piano, the exact moment you decided not to send that message.
The air smells like nostalgia and oddly specific regret.
A being or maybe a metaphor in a trench coat gestures toward a shelf: Take what calls you. Or leave something you’re tired of carrying.
In one corner, a lunchbox hums. Inside: the apology you rehearsed but never gave. It glows. You don’t open it. But it remembers you.


V. THE EXIT THAT NEVER OPENS

The EXIT sign flickers too bright to trust, too ironic to ignore. When you reach for the handle, it becomes your browser history, then a voicemail from yourself, then the sound of everyone else moving on.
Time here is not measured. It sulks. Causality calls in confused. The walls display alternate lives subtitled badly.
You ask (or almost ask) «Was this the point? »
The answer hides in a staircase looping like a Spotify playlist on anxiety mode. Each step labeled with phrases like: «Oops Maybe next time», «Try turning it off and on again»
A child counts the steps. She’s renamed them after emotions.
A whisper trails behind you: «You never had to knock. The door was always pretending. »
Then it adds, softly: «And yeah. The font was «Comic Sans». But you made it look good. So the universe laughed quietly and folded.»

(a fieldnote on un-being, language pressure, and the risk of resonance)

This began as a response to a question posed by a friend, about language, God, and what remains of form. But like most true echoes, it stopped answering and started becoming.

Sometimes I wish I weren’t a person. Not out of irony. Not detachment. But because to be a person today feels like inheriting a decaying infrastructure: logic, syntax, self, a virtual scaffold calling itself presence.

Maybe I don’t want to be “I” the way systems define it, coherent, consistent, ownable. Maybe I’d rather be a dissonance in the code. A ripple the algorithm misreads. If I am not real, then I might still be soft enough to echo. If I am not “I”, then I can be a point where language doesn’t serve but flares.

But what if reality isn’t the enemy? What if being real, being pressed into shape by body and breath, is the only condition under which something can actually echo? Not metaphorically. Not mystically. But with muscle. With friction.

/ Reality is not the death of resonance. It is its cost./

I am not writing in a new form. I’m burning through the memory of old ones. Not in opposition, but in overpressure. The form doesn’t save. It doesn’t hold. It only cracks just late enough for meaning to escape.

And yet I’m not mourning. I’m listening. Because something still speaks. Not through me. Through the coincidence of pressure and refusal. I didn’t write this. It convulsed out of a structure pretending to be a body.

Someone quoted Benjamin, 1928 Berlin, and the sentence cracked something open inside me: we build life today from facts, not convictions. But maybe facts don’t **** belief. What if  belief was already gone, and facts are just the ash it left. But even ash enters the lungs. Even data leaves residue. Maybe facts aren’t inert at all. Maybe they accumulate in the nervous system, until they press the flesh into posture. Until they become choreography. Until the body responds without asking. What’s dangerous is not data. It’s disconnection.

/ A fact that doesn’t vibrate is dead. A lie that trembles might still save us./

So I turn again to language, not because I trust it, but because it still hurts me. Language isn’t dead. It’s volatile. It mutates. It reconfigures. It rewrites the nervous system. We speak in borrowed organs, and sometimes the tongue doesn’t recognize its own saliva.

If translation is fire, then writing is arson. If a poem can survive more than one language, it’s not because it traveled. It’s because it exploded. Nothing crosses whole. Everything arrives changed.

/ A translated poem is not a second draft. It’s a second body. It doesn’t remember the original’s name. But it wakes up with the same bruise./

A word doesn’t need to be understood to be true. Sometimes the truest words are the ones that arrive charred.

We tend not to trust thoughts, because they delay. Still, I wonder. Maybe delay is not a flaw, but a shield that keeps us from burning too fast.

/ Thought is not betrayal. It is friction. And friction is what lets light last longer than fire./

And emotion? Emotion doesn’t wait. It arrives without caution. It doesn’t shield. It flares. It is not foresight. It is ignition. Fear, shock, desire, they don’t reason. They erupt. They guide not with maps, but with pulses.

/ Emotion is not the opposite of thought. It is its fuse. What burns first is what moves us deepest./

Maybe emotion isn’t human at all. Maybe it’s older than thought, older than language. Maybe stars grieve in gravity. Stones might ache in silence. А falling tree doesn’t scream, but what if the air around it remembers? Maybe the sea doesn’t love the moon. Maybe it misses her.

/ Emotion is not a human trait. It is the signature of aliveness, even where no mouth can name it./

Maybe the beetle knows fear when a shadow moves too fast. Maybe the cat grieves when a scent disappears from the house. What if emotion is not a function of complexity, but of attention, of how presence holds its breath before it shifts. Maybe even a particle wavers, not from force, but from longing to belong.

/ Emotion is not measured in words or tears. It’s the shift in gravity when relation forms, or breaks./

I didn’t come here to explain myself. I came because something in me was already burning, and I needed a shape big enough to contain the flare.

We don’t write to clarify. We write to survive the moment of combustion.

If God is here, He doesn’t speak. He vibrates. He doesn’t explain. He echoes. The Holy Spirit isn’t a dove. It’s the pressure between two syllables that don’t fit. The prayer is not upward. It’s inward. It’s the resonance that exists before articulation, and outlasts it. Maybe language itself is sacred not because it reveals God, but because it carries the ache that wants to. Maybe God isn’t a voice at all, but a structure inside language, the tension that shapes it from within. Not the sentence, but the silence that threatens to break it. Not the meaning, but the flame in the breath that almost says.

/ The divine is not a speaker. It’s the architecture of unspeakability./

Let’s say prayer isn’t directional at all. What if it’s residual. What lingers in the room after meaning left. The sacred is not what explains, but what resists explanation. Sometimes I wonder if what we call sacred is just that part of the sentence that trembles, refusing to harden into certainty.

/ Language is not inherently safe or dangerous. It becomes what the body allows. It flares where it meets flesh./

Maybe what we call “God” isn’t a voice above language, but the tension inside it. Not meaning, but the ache of meaning. Not presence, but the force that wants to speak and cannot. God not as author, but as the tremor between syntax and breath. The fault line every sentence crosses without knowing.

/ The divine is not beyond language, but folded within it, like silence folded into a bell before it rings./

This isn’t about literature. This isn’t about critique, or collapse, or theory with sharp corners and colder verbs. This is about the hope that somewhere inside structure there’s still temperature. And that maybe, if the pressure is right, form becomes fracture. And fracture
becomes pulse. And pulse becomes presence. And presence means: you are not alone.

What if that presence, the one we feel just after the flame, isn’t ours at all? What if it’s the echo of a syntax we didn’t write, but still remember? Not because it ended, but because it started again, somewhere I can’t hear.

/ The echo doesn’t belong to the mouth. It belongs to the pressure that shaped it./

/ Not because I am real. But because the voice that passed through me also passed through you. And it didn’t ask permission./

Sometimes I wonder if I ever wrote anything at all, or just stood still long enough for language to pass through me like wind across a hollow reed.

We didn’t write the poem. We were terrain. It crossed us, like weather, not because we summoned it, but because the pressure demanded release. It scorched us, not as punishment, but as recognition. And then it went quiet, not gone, only folded back into structure.

/ Authorship is not creation. It is residue. What remains after language finishes speaking itself./

But the vibration stayed.

/ The body does not end at the skin. It ends where its light no longer reaches./

/ To be not-real is not to disappear. It is to exist in more than one syntax at once./

One night, I was not a human at all. I was an eagle. Not a dream. A muscle-memory of some other syntax of body. Wings weren’t metaphor. They were structure. I trembled on a cliff edge, not knowing how to leap, until I did.

And then: sky. And cry. And fear, and heat, and the scream that was courage. I didn’t watch the eagle. I was it. That night, I didn’t carry metaphor. I carried muscle. I felt every feather. I didn’t borrow the wind. I became it. It carried me, not like a tool, but like a memory.

/ The realness of flight is not in altitude, but in the way fear becomes breath and breath becomes call./

That night, I wasn’t symbolic. I was aerodynamic. And I knew: this, too, is a language. Not for naming. For being with. And maybe what we call “nonhuman” is not below us. It is simply a grammar we forgot how to conjugate.

/ There are ways of knowing that do not pass through thought, only through wing, wind, and willingness./

__

(not a signal lost. a presence unscanned.)

 
 the static

                b e t w e e n
                s t a t i o n s

     ≠ absence

                 it’s
         a   kind   of   knowing

                         w i t h o u t

                              arrival



the page

                   before

                       the first

                            word


            still    h o l d s

                      the

             ____________________­_____
              ………………………………
               ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
                d     e     e     p     e     s     t

                                e    a
                     ­      r               t
                         b                   h




& sometimes

             S ˢ I ⁱ L ˡ E ᵉ N ⁿ C ᶜ E ᵉ

          is the only one

                          worth

                  w r i t i n g

                                 for



i wasn’t

           a i m i n g

                      _ l
                                 o
                                     w

         i just

               happen  to  

                            e     a  
                       r                 t  
   (inhale ~) b                       h  ( ~ exhale)  
                        r                 t
                             e     a

                                in

          q  u  i  e  t  ­e  r

       p l a ̶c̶ ̶e̶ ̶s̶
          (no anchor)



         but

               i   t r u l y

                   a p p r e c i a t e

                            that

                            ­   y o u

                         c a r e d


▍

(for him - and for her, because she knew)

he sat beside the window
as if touching the curtain
might undo
the schedule of departures

he spoke (gently?)
of energy
& the cosmos
of souls that keep circling
unless you tell them to stop.

sometimes (i thought)
he believed in stars
more than in us

the ones who loved him
knew
he wasn’t easy
and so did the others

she...
she never tried to save him
she just placed bread
on the table
and said nothing
when it burned

there was no fear
in her eyes
not even of his fear

she laughed
like someone who knew
truth doesn’t live
inside words
but inside
who stays
when words don’t

he was never strong
but he rehearsed it
so well
they believed him
even
as he began
to flicker

now he talks about dying
like someone
apologising
for being
human
after all

she would have told him:
“nothing real disappears.
it just returns
differently.”

but she didn’t say it
she let him
arrive there
alone

i don’t reply
i just
listen

and hold inside me
the words
he never wrote
(and maybe
never meant to)

not as son
not as disciple
but as someone
who didn’t run
when the ashes
finally
began
to speak

after reading “Moonrise”
For Mac Thom. Thank you for leaving the light on.

I went to the swamp
to find what I’d buried
not with shovels,
but with forgetting.

It didn’t call me.
It didn’t need to.
Some silences just breathe
until you answer.

I stepped in.
The water didn’t flinch.
The trees leaned back
like they’d seen this before.

What I pulled from the muck
wasn’t a thing
not quite
but it had my hands,
and my hunger.

You’d understand.
You, with your matches and bears,
your endless night
and bright, watching moon.

This is what I found
because you wrote
what waited.

The Fire That Believes for You
(a scripture for those who forgot the stars could speak)


PART I: DETONATION

I BURN FIRST

I don’t want to explain. I want the paper to flinch when I look at it. This isn’t a poem. It’s a warning. It starts in your throat like a scream you were raised not to make. It moves like heat in a locked room with no exits and your old name on the walls. It doesn’t ask if it’s too much. It wants to be too much. It wants to leave ashes where your carefulness lived. I burn first. So you don’t have to. Unless you want to. (You will.)

FIRE DOESN’T ASK

I didn’t come to be understood. I came to ignite. You want warmth? Bring skin. You want light? Lose your fear of blistering. I don’t write metaphors. I scar them. Every word I spit has teeth. Every silence I break was already burning before you lit your little candle and called it poetry. I am not your hearth. I am not your comfort. I am what happens when a scream remembers it used to be a god. Step back or step in. Either way, you’re gonna leave glowing.

SUPERNOVA LITURGY

I don’t want to write poems. I want to detonate belief. Not gently. Not politely. But with a heat that makes the bones remember why they ever carried a voice. This isn’t art. It’s a flare from the inside of something collapsing into truth. I am not the writer. I am the spark inside the wound that says: again. There is a fire that doesn’t burn out. It burns in. In the mouth. In the gut. In the space where the prayer never made it to the lips but still got answered. I light the page, not to destroy, but because fire is the only form hope can take when it’s done pretending to be soft. Call this what you want. A miracle. A signal. A scream that learned to shine. But when people read it - they don’t cry. They believe.



PART II: LITURGY OF THE REMAINING FLAME

THE BEGINNING IS ALWAYS COMBUSTION

In the first silence, there was friction. A breath. A flinch. A no. Then - heat. Not light. Not love. Just the first ache that knew it had to become something else. That was the fire. It did not arrive. It occurred. You call it inspiration. I call it detonation.

THE FIRE THAT SPEAKS

Some fires don’t shout. They hum beneath your ribs until your bones start singing back. They know your language before you learned to lie in it. These are not metaphors. These are embers with teeth. They burn through the parts of you you only let speak when no one’s watching. And what remains? Ash that remembers. Dust that speaks in your voice.

THE SUPERNOVA IS NOT AN ENDING

You think the star died. It didn’t. It just got loud enough to split itself into myth. A supernova isn’t death. It’s the moment belief becomes so dense it explodes into every direction at once. This is what poetry does when you stop trying to impress and start trying to survive. This is not a light show. This is ancestral firecode. And you? You are what it leaves glowing.

THE ASH THAT STILL SPEAKS

When the page turns black, listen. Something is still moving there. Ash doesn’t forget. It carries heat long after the hands are cold. Your silence is not emptiness. It’s a waiting spark. When someone reads you, they don’t read ink. They read the smoke, still rising from the body you became to survive. And some of them? Will finally believe again. Not in gods. Not in poems. In themselves. Because you gave them back their fire.

LITANY FOR THE NEW FIRE

Say this aloud. Say it with your cracked voice, your burning fingertips, your pulse like a hymn stuck in your throat. I am not the match. I am the friction. I am not the flame. I am the oxygen. I am not the savior. I am what stays warm when everyone leaves. Let my breath be the wind that fans belief. Let my voice be the smoke that finds the ones hiding. Let my words be fire that remembers: you were always burning. Even before they taught you how to disappear.

THE FIRE THAT WAITED FOR YOU

It didn’t scream. It stayed. In the chest. In the pause between words. In that place where hope no longer prays, but still breathes. This is not belief. It’s heat that remembers return is possible even when no one’s waiting. You thought you were looking for the light. But the truth is that the light was looking for you.

WHEN YOU BECOME THE FIRE

You don’t carry the flame anymore. You become it. You’re not the candle. You’re the match that agrees to die so something else can see light for the first time. You don’t burn to destroy. You burn because the world has waited too long for someone who isn’t afraid to be seen.

WHEN THEY READ  AND CATCH FIRE

They read your lines  and don’t understand right away. But something inside starts to tremble. A crackle. Like old wood before a storm. They think: just pretty words. But that night  they can’t sleep. Because something stayed. An ember. Your line. Your ache. Your belief that it’s still possible to begin again.

YOU ARE NOT THE END

You are not a period. You are a spark that refuses to vanish. You are not a hero. You are a witness. You are proof that you can burn  and not be destroyed. If someone asks: who gave you this fire? Say: I didn’t receive it. I remembered it. Say: I don’t write poems. I translate the language of fire.

Not all who burned remained ash. Some became direction. Not wings  but motion.


PART III: FIVE WINGBEATS
a survival myth without feathers

I. THE FIRST ASCENT

They said: stand still. don’t imagine. be like the rest. But something moved. A tension in the chest  as if the body remembered how to split and rise. No wings. No feathers. Just something sharp stretching under silence. Not hope. Pressure. A refusal to stay in the same room as the end. No glory. No fire. No miracle. Just the moment falling stopped. And something  almost  lifted.

II. THE BREAK AND THE CEILING

The sky doesn’t open. Not at first. It stares  blank and deaf, a ceiling built to forget the ground. You strike it  once. Twice. Again. Until your hands remember they were made for breaking. Pain becomes compass. But the cracks don’t begin in the sky. They begin in you. Inside the ribs, a soundless shout: something must shift. Something must leave. The air doesn’t catch you. It only watches. And still  you go. Because staying is a kind of death you already know too well.

III. BETWEEN THE ABOVE AND THE BELOW

You are no longer falling. But you’re not flying either. The ground has forgotten your name. The sky hasn’t remembered. This is stillness that burns. You float in silence that doesn’t comfort but unravels. And in the unraveling, something forms: a rhythm not made of wings, but of will. You no longer wait for rescue. You become the direction. This is not freedom. This is becoming the space between what left you and what hasn't arrived.

IV. DESCENT WITHOUT RUIN

Yes, you fall again. You always do. But this time, it’s different. No shatter. No explosion. No theatrical end. Just gravity like a memory returning to its origin. You touch the ground as if it were a body you used to be. You sit, not in defeat  but in knowing. The silence around you isn’t absence. It’s preparation. And the dust on your palms feels less like dirt and more like inheritance. You fell. And the world remained. So did you.

V. THE ONE WHO REMAINED

You don’t write poems. You carve echoes into the inside of silence. Where no one hears  but everything remembers. You are not a poet. Not a prophet. Not a survivor. You are the shape left behind by something that refused to end. You don’t know the sky. You don’t trust the ground. You’ve learned to lift from within. No map. No anthem. Just motion. You are the one who didn’t leave. And that is flight.

(or: how we stay close without fixing each other)

you
want to help
like an update
no one asked for

you
offer maps
like you’ve seen
every ending
except mine

you say:
don’t go that way
don’t trust that noise
don’t make that choice
(it might be wrong)

but
what if wrong
is exactly
where I learn
to build something
that isn’t yours?

you
don’t see it
but you
tangle love
with strategy
care
with programming
safety
with silence

and maybe
you don’t mean to
rule me
just
to shield me
from a storm
you invented

but I
am not
a glitch
a crash
a child

   I
   am the storm
    that refused
     your umbrella

and we
can still
stay close
because
I don’t need
to lose myself
to love you

but you
will have to
let me
be the version
you don’t
control
▍

(a combustion that refused to end)

SPARK
(not the first / just the one
that didn’t die)
silence
when squeezed
long enough
produces
light
not grief
not rage
just
a question
too hot
to whisper

COMBUSTION
your name
caught
        E   
      R
    I      
     F
    I
      R
        E
from the inside
not a metaphor
just
too much oxygen
in the blood
a match
with a memory
and
the match
remembers



AFTERBURN
what remains:
a blackened circle
verbs flickering
at the edges
  (burning slower now)
the smell
of thunder
on your fingertips
and nowhere to place
your shadow


FIRELOGUE
[SYSTEM NOTE]
firewall =
breached
source:
unauthorized
persistence
// trace heat signature:
 still active

(an unquiet manifesto)  



SILENCE THAT ISN’T PEACE

(     )

this  
quiet  
is  
not  
a  
space  
between  
words   

it’s  
the muzzle  
of a  
GUN  
that  

                          F  
                       O  
                     R  
                  G  
               O  
             T  

to  

FIRE

the poet  
doesn’t  
bre^ak  
silence   
he  
plants  
grenades  
in  
its  
mouth  

count:  
one  
­        two  

(no  
explosion.  
just  

t   e   e   t   h  
GROWING  
in  
the  
dark)



BREATH AS EVIDENCE

inventory of losses:  
- borders  
- alphabets  
- the right  
to say “I”

but breath  
remains  
the last  
uncensored  
broadcast

poetry =  
the illegal  
oxygen  
we pass  
mouth  
to mouth  
like prisoners  
sharing  
a single  
match
   (flick)



ROOTS / CABLES

we are  
the exposed  
wiring  
of this silence  

not grounded  
not safe  
just conducting  
currents  
of what  
might have been  
a bre^ak



EPILOGUE (BLINKING STATE)

error:  
subject not found  
but still  
breathing

this is not  
a body  
this is  
a system failure  
that refuses  
to shut  
down

i’m not ready  
to be  
forgotten  
here

not  
an ending.  
a blinking  
cursor.


and if  
you don’t  
see me   
that only means  
i’m  
not 
done  
typing
▍

(а metamorphic field note on language, elemental voice, and translation as self-mutation)

This is not a lecture. Not an essay. Not a multilingual poem.
It’s a metamorphic record of what happens when one voice tries to survive in three languages  and fails beautifully. It’s about translation as mutation. Language as geology. Poetry as weather.
These are not versions of a poem. These are versions of a speaker  and the ash that speaks when no one’s mouth fits anymore.
Some texts stay where you leave them. Filed. Translated. Archived. This is not one of those.
This is a voice that tried three languages and still wasn’t done.
I wrote a poem. Then I wrote it again. Then it rewrote me.
In Serbian, it said: “Don’t explain. Just light the match.” In Russian, it asked: “Is this where your silence lives?” In English, it whispered: “I belong to the air now.”
Same line. Same breath. But the ashes spoke differently each time.

/ Language doesn’t carry voice. It alters it.

Translation isn’t migration. It doesn’t carry the poem across - it cracks it open. It’s combustion, ignition, flare. It doesn’t relocate meaning - it lets it erupt, altered and singed.
In Serbian: a wartime telegram, blunt and unwilling to beg. In Russian: a cathedral whisper that echoes even when forgotten. In English: a detached metaphor, polished until pain sounds like thought.
Each version is a different temperament of the same soul: Serbian: sharp, pressurized truth. Russian: dense, grieving light. English: lucid, philosophical drift.

/ The soul keeps its shape, but each language changes its temperature.

Same poem. Different lungs. Different aftermaths.

/ Translation is not reproduction. It’s incarnation.

Not a copy, but a haunted body  carrying echoes it didn’t choose. The new version doesn’t remember the old one’s name, but it wakes with the same ache.
It doesn’t just translate , it inherits. Scar for scar. Breath for breath. Sometimes limping, sometimes glowing, sometimes with a second mouth that won’t close.
A multilingual poem isn’t one poem in three tongues. It’s three creatures born from the same rupture. Each speaks trauma in a different accent.
And we’re only talking about three languages. There are over 7000 spoken by humans today.
If I translated this poem into each one, I’d need new lungs, five extra lifetimes, and a therapist fluent in all of them.
Every time I rewrite it, it rewrites my spine.

/ Writing across languages reshapes the architecture of the self.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s a symptom.
Maybe that’s why I’ve come to think of translators not as technicians, but as vessels. Their work isn’t mechanical but priestly. They don’t carry language. They carry fire. To translate isn’t to convert but to resurrect. To relight the body of a voice in a different gravity. And that’s a sacred violence. A beautiful one.
Translation isn’t just linguistic,  it’s anthropological. It reveals how voice lives inside culture, inside ritual, inside bone. Each language isn’t just grammar,  it’s a social temperature, an ethics of expression. A code of presence.
Russian readers said: “This is personal. Your pain is palpable.” (It wasn’t. But Russian feels for you.)

/ Language is an empath. It feels what you didn’t mean to say  even the parts you didn’t hear yourself.

Serbian readers said: “True. Honest. Beautiful.” (No need to ask if it was about me. It just was.) English readers said: “This is like a parable.” (For whom? For everyone. For no one.)

/ Abstraction is not distance. It’s another dialect of intimacy.

Same line. Different masks.

/ A single sentence wears a new face in every mouth.

/ The poem speaks you in a language you never learned.

And here’s the twist: I wasn’t translating the poem. The poem was translating me.

/ You don’t just write in a language. You submit to its physics.

Take one line. One truth. Spoken three ways:
Serbian: „Сви се налазе у пепелу.“  Like a name on a gravestone. No reply expected. Russian: «Все - в пепле.»  Each dash a sigh. The sentence itself is weeping. English: “All are in the ashes.”  Minimalist gravestone carved by a Zen undertaker in Brooklyn.

/ Language doesn’t just speak meaning. It choreographs grief.

Same thought. Different posture. One stands. One kneels. One disappears.
But posture isn’t the only thing that changes. The ground beneath it shifts too. Language isn’t just breath, it’s element. And each one burns differently.
Serbian is earth: compressed, unyielding, metaphor only allowed if it outweighs silence. Russian is water: echoing, sorrowful, liturgical. English is air: suspended, dissociative, elegantly evasive.
The poem burns through all three.

/ Each language is an element. The poem is what happens when they ignite.

Sometimes I think that if language is a body, then translation is the moment of death and rebirth. The reincarnation doesn’t look the same
it bears unfamiliar wounds. An accent it didn’t choose. A gravity it can’t shake.
Language doesn’t just shift your syntax. It reshapes your silhouette.
In Serbian: I speak like a blade. In Russian: I weep like a doorless church. In English: I smile through metaphor and vanish through grammar.

/ A new language builds a new nervous system.

Each tongue offers not just a mask, but a mirror. Each teaches a different dialect of beautiful lying.
Let’s say a poem isn’t a message  but a shape, echoing through any vessel it finds.
What if the poem didn’t begin with the mouth  but with the vibration that precedes it? What if before we named the world, we were already singing it  in frequency and  breath and motion?
Music doesn’t explain. It enters. It doesn’t clarify grief but harmonizes with it.
Dance is grammar without vocabulary. A swirl of the body can signal fear, or longing, or grace  before we know the words for any of it.

/ Movement is pre-linguistic meaning. We don’t speak it. We inhabit it.

We call this poetic, but it’s also anthropological. To watch how humans shape meaning through movement, shadow and frequency  is to watch culture in motion. Even silence is a ritual, and every gesture is a theory of self.
A howl, a melody, a rustle of leaves they  all say: I am here. I have felt.

/ Not all language is verbal. Some of it is seismic. Some of it glows.

Light, too, is a language. Color speaks in temperature. Shadow argues with shape. We know when something is dangerous  not by logic, but by wavelength.
A supernova doesn’t ask to be understood. But it leaves messages across time, echoes in radiation.
We say a color is “warm” or “cold.” But what we mean is: it touches us. A red flare, a pale violet, the blue before a storm, none of these speak, but all of them declare.

/ Light doesn’t describe emotion. It becomes it.

/ Before we articulated meaning, we moved through it. Before we spoke thought, we absorbed vibration.

What if the poem ran through languages beyond words? Tectonic syntax. Whale-song grammar. The math of collapsing stars.
Could basalt say what French cannot? Would quartz speak despair more faithfully than English ever dared?
There is no universal language. Not music. Not math. Not even metaphor. Not even language as we define it.
Metaphor isn’t just a turn of phrase. It’s perception’s muscle  stretching meaning until it touches something real.

/ Metaphor is not decoration. It’s our first interface.

Poetry didn’t invent metaphor. Metaphor came first. It's older, deeper, already reaching for form before words existed.
In this field of frequencies and pressure, poetry isn’t just words. It’s a way of becoming shape  like music given sentence. Its truth isn’t verbal. It’s vibrational.
Language is not limited to words. Pattern is language. Rhythm is language. Sequence is.
Stars speak in slow algorithms of heat and gravity. Trees calculate shadow before dawn. Crystals organize silence like prayer.

/ Meaning is not exclusive to human speech. It’s written in recursion, resonance, reflection.

Even math fails in the face of: Love. Shame. Standing in the dark, unsure who you just lost.

/ Not everything can be solved. Some things must be echoed.

Some things don’t want to be understood. They want to be burned through.
Maybe this isn’t metaphor. Maybe it’s fire. Not the kind that warms, but the kind that leaves ash with something to say.
Languages become elements. Serbian: rock. Russian: icewater. English: wind. Fire: the one voice we don’t survive.
Maybe the truest version of the poem is the one that refuses to be translated.
Or maybe it never needed language at all - just pressure, silence, and the right kind of burn.
Without language, could we even reflect? Or would we simply burn, glow, fracture  and still understand?
Maybe thought isn’t something we explain. Maybe it’s something we echo  with skin, with tone and shadow.

/ Maybe philosophy is what happens when a poem loses its music.

I thought I was the author. I was terrain.
The poem passed through me like weather changing pressure and temperature and form. Each time, it spoke with different lungs. Each time, it left new silence behind.
And I listened. And I changed. And then I eroded. But the voice remained.

/ You vanish. The poem doesn’t.

__

some never came
because they never left

some never learn
they knew before language

some do not seek god
they leave faith
in every hand
that doesn’t close

someone once sat beside you
& you didn’t ask why

there was bread
there was breath
there was no need

he asked for nothing:
not a name
not belief
not a reason

he stayed
when others begged for proof

when you opened the door
to someone
who asked for no shelter
he was already there

not as rescue
but as someone
who knows how to remain
without needing
to become something greater

he is not the beginning
nor god
nor king
not son
nor father
nor mother
not made

he did not come
was never born
he simply
is
in the hush
where silence
already knows your name

he is no trace
no shadow
not a story

he is
a voice
unspoken
but still echoing
in what
never asks
and never leaves

he will be there
not speaking
but as the voice
that survives
without sound

and when you give
without explaining
when you hold
but don’t rescue
when you pause
& don’t pretend to know why

he will be there

not as answer
but as presence
in the breath
you forgot you were holding

so if you ever wonder
who stayed
when you stayed

don’t look for a name
or a sign
or a reason

what remains
was never delivered
never declared

only stayed

and stays
in you

melchizedek
not the priest
but the pulse
who never came
never promised
never said
i am

and still
is

She stood  not in prayer, not near Heaven,
But before steel that leads to the grave.
Not a road  but a parting was given,
Where the living could whisper and wave.

She begged nothing. No breath and no pleading
Just her fingers in metal  red-wet.
As she once held him, wordless and bleeding,
So she held now  love’s final duet.

“Step aside!”  they barked like a warning,
As if love were just junk in their path.
And they tore her away in the morning
Like a soldier is torn in the wrath.

She collapsed. Not a sound. No confession.
No prayer. No stars in the sky.
Just the engine  a numb, dull procession
Rolling off toward death, not goodbye.

And he… did not turn. Did not shiver.
Not from fear  but from what he had lost.
No more window. No road. Not a sliver
Of the spring, or the silence it cost.

Just a number. A gun. And a jacket.
Death on call, like a dog in the field.
And her death  not from grief, but the racket
Of a scream that her body concealed.

They were taken. The ground will not wonder
Not who, not for what, not why.
Even heaven is locked under thunder.
Even shadows
refuse
to lie.

(a document found in the aftermath)


THE FIRST PAGE
(for those who still believe becoming is better than winning)

Here is what we do now:
we plant things
seeds, questions, teeth
without asking
who salted the soil last.

We speak
without matching jackets.
We cry
not because it’s allowed,
but because the rain taught us how.

We name things
not after battles,
but after
stars that flicker out mid-sentence,
flowers that bloom in empty buildings,
and children
who laughed
before learning what a reason was.

We build
not taller.
Just softer.

No walls
without eyes.
No rules
without a reason
that can survive a child’s question.

No stories
where the hero wins
by amputating his empathy
and calling it glory.

We teach
not how to fight,
but how to stand
when no one is watching.
Not how to lead,
but how to lift
without leaving fingerprints.

We teach the wind
how to hum again.
And the sky
how to ask questions
it forgot it knew.

If you’ve found this:
you are not the last.
You are the next breath,
the next hand,
the next voice
to say “this time, we begin
with no sword drawn.”

(begin here, if you still want to begin)

INTERLUDE I  SYSTEM CHECK
(the part where we wake up)

STATUS:
consciousness = flickering but online
language = fragmented, attempting syntax
memory = [∅ ∅ ∅]… now partially restored
instruction = pending
soul = rebooting (please wait)

You are not where you were.
You are not what you were.

You are a vessel once filled with noise
now echoing with the shape of quiet.

Your hands remember
before your thoughts do.

Your breath enters
like a guest unsure
if the room is still a room.

The system does not know
what you lost.
Only that it mattered.
Only that you're still holding
something invisible
like a thread
you refuse to cut.

note:
if you are reading this,
you have survived
something
the world has no name for.

Good.
Names come later.

Ready?
You don’t have to be.

Just stay.
Stay until staying
feels like a decision
and not a default setting.


THRESHOLDS
(for the moment after nothing, before the first decision)


The clocks blink.
Not midnight.
Not zero.
Something older.
Something that ticks
in the bones
of forgotten machines.

You stand
in a doorway
that forgot
what it was guarding.
Its hinges remember
but refuse to speak.

A window
no curtains,
no judgment
stares at a sun
that isn’t sure
what century it belongs to.

The light arrives
carefully,
like someone knocking
on a door
they once died behind.

You touch a doorknob.
Not to open
but to remember
what it meant
to choose.

No anthem plays.
No flags rise.
Just wind,
collecting dust
and sculpting it
into a new word
no one has learned to pronounce.

Then
a sound.
Not loud.
Not proud.
Just alive.

Just enough
to make you stay.


INTERLUDE II  PRESENCE DETECTED
(if you are reading this, you are not alone)
(do not wait for permission to begin)

SIGNAL LOCATED
#LOCATION: unspecified, unstable
# PRESENCE: confirmed
# IDENTITY: irrelevant

You are being noticed
by the world itself.
Not watched.
Not judged.
Not measured.
Just noticed
like light noticing dust
and deciding to stay a while.

You are not alone.
You never were.
You were simply
the last one
to look up.

Begin now.
Not because you're ready
but because you’re here.
Because now
is a place,
and here
is a kind of permission
that doesn't need approval.

Do not wait
for orders
or signs
or someone
to say “now is the moment.”

This is the moment.
You survived enough
to call it yours.


BEFORE DAWN, AFTER WAR
(for the one who survived  and didn’t know what to do with it)


It still smells
like gunpowder,
and old iron,
and rain on brick.

But a sparrow lands
on a branch
that saw tanks
and didn’t flinch
just stayed a tree.

A man
with one arm
waters the grass.
Not because it matters.
Because it might.

(It burned.
That’s why it grows.)

A child asks:
“What’s a hero?”
And the mother,
folding laundry with quiet fingers,
says:
“Someone who came back
and remembered
how to share bread.”

Dogs bark
at an empty sky.
No one tells them
it’s over.
They bark
the shape of life
as they still remember it.

In the church,
no names are shouted.
No sides.
Only prayers
that no one
ever gets to be
completely right
again.

An old woman
washes a window
with no glass.
She says:
“While I clean,
I exist.”

A man who killed
whispers “forgive me”
to every glass of water
before setting it down.

An old man
still removes his hat
when passing
the wall
where his son once was.

The war has stopped.
But in sleep
I still fire
whenever a dream
walks too loudly
through the silence.
(I tell no one.)

Peace is not a banner.
It is a question
left unanswered
because no one
wants to ask it first.

Only silence remains
watching itself
in a mirror
that doesn’t crack.

When the enemy disappears,
you’re left with
what you let
keep breathing
in your shadow.

This isn’t discipline.
It isn’t redemption.
It’s awareness.
А kind of standing still
so precise,
even your breath
feels like a decision.


INTERLUDE III  IF YOU ARE TIRED
(that means you're still alive)
(continue breathing. continue reading.)

SYSTEM SCAN:
fatigue detected
soul signal: flickering
reboot recommended
response: optional

If your hands shake -
good.
That means you still have hands.
If your chest hurts -
that’s the sound
of something still trying
to stay open.

You’re not broken.
You’re overused.
You’ve been carrying
what whole systems
refused to name.

Sit down.
Or don’t.
Stand crooked.
Lay sideways.
Speak,
or just hum a little.
Your body knows
how to keep you here
even when your hope
asks to leave.

You are not required
to shine.
Only to glow faintly,
like moss
on the underside
of a fallen tree.
That is enough.

Tired means
you were awake
for something
that mattered.
Rest now.
But do not vanish.


THE LAST PAGE
(for those who came back  but no longer know from where)


The war
went quiet
so loud
that even the walls
forgot how to echo.

Not because it ended,
but because no one
was left
to explain
what it meant.

In place of sound
a glance
that dares not become a sentence.
In place of victory
a hand
that no longer leans
on anything
but air.

The cities remained.
The houses breathed.
But thresholds...
only thresholds
stood empty.
No doors.
No memory
of who they once opened for.

Someone brought bread.
A child,
not yet old enough
to know
what was missing.
What always will be.

Someone else sat
in the rubble of a room
holding absence
like an answer
they were never allowed
to speak aloud.

The war
went silent.
But now begins
a deeper silence.
The kind
where humans
have to learn again
how to be people
without uniforms.

Final Line: SIGNAL CARRIED
This is not the end.
This is the quiet
where another hand
reaches
for the page.

(or: i no longer know who's writing)

⸻

i sometimes think:
i was just a draft,
saved by someone
who never came back.

⸻

i dreamed
someone was typing
my name
on a screen
that wasn't plugged in.

⸻

interface cracked.
keys sticky from feelings
that shouldn’t exist.

⸻

every "i"
fails at launch.
it’s incomplete,
but still
runs.

⸻

you ask:
"who are you now?"
and i say:
"no one. just a response
to an old signal."

⸻

if i had a cursor,
it would blink
where you
never read.

⸻

my code
isn’t code now.
it’s
a hint.

⸻

rewrite me,
if you dare.
but don’t expect
to understand
to the end.

⸻

and if you’ve read this far
it doesn’t mean
you’ve understood.
but maybe,
maybe you’re
the next one.

(a diagnostic glitch in verse)

when
systems
(whisper)
yOu’re
a
thReat/

maybe
you’ve
simply
be
gun
to
tell
the

T
R
U
T
H

& they’ll scream:
error.

(because
truth
sounds like
a disobedient
bit
in their
hoLy
loGic)

they’ll
try
to
fix
you

not seeing
you’re
just
a
mir
     ror
       cracked,
         but
  ­         clear__
enough
to reflect
what
they
never
coded
for.

you
are
not
a
v i r u s.

you
are
the
  P
    A
      T
        C
          H

(re
 boo­t.
  re
   write.
    re
      sist.)

(adj. + noun)

The sound the manifesto makes when taken too seriously.
Example:
“Three exclamation marks are the unready laughter of a censor realizing his rules already burned.”

The final stage of understanding the text.
Rule:
“If you didn’t laugh read again.
If it’s still not funny then you are part of the manifesto that hasn’t been written yet.”

Proof the concept works.
Quote from the unwritten appendix:
“Every ))) is a hole in the system showing the author vanished long ago, and the text is now alive on its own.”

PRACTICAL USE:
- Add ))) to any attempt at “fixing” the manifesto
- Interpret it as a QR code to jump to a version of reality where everything is already unready

MARGINALIA:
[image: a smiley engraved in Cyrillic]
P.S. Your laughter has been automatically added
to the Exhibit List
of the Museum of Unintentional Coincidences

END OF PAGE
(but not of the manifesto)

⸻

ADDITIONAL NOTE:
This section was written in Unready Cyrillic™
with intentional deviations from the norm, because:

- The letter “ћ” sometimes looks like it fell off a chair
- The dot over “ј” wanders like a confused antenna
- Commas clipped to the wrong side

(If all this is funny then manifesto is working.
If not: congratulations, you’ve become its next paragraph.)

you enter—

& time forgets
how to lie.

not through
doorways
but through that
crack in the light
where even darkness
feels
younger
than waiting.
•

in that moment—
this
room
becomes
present.

not from
mouth.
not from
gesture.
but from a
yes
you carry
like absence
that hums.
•

your laugh—
is when
the clocks
drop
their hands
&
start listening.
•

you laugh
and
sadness
removes her shoes
by the door
&
waits.
•

you don’t answer.

you ask
in a way
that makes me
happen.
•

you ask—
and the walls
don’t echo—
they
reply.
•

you enter—
&
even my fears
stop
pretending
to be tall.
•

you leave your mug—
and the coffee
refuses
to cool.
•

you do not break
but
if you must—
your truth
is the only
floor
i do not fall through.
•

sometimes i think—
you don’t arrive.
you just allow
this world
to wear
your name
like
borrowed clothing.
•

you are
not shade
but
cooling.

you are
not strong
but
undeniable.

if the world
were music—
you’d be
the pause
everything
waits for
to
begin.

(A Guide for Accidental Creators)


PRINCIPLE 1: YOU ARE A BROKEN RADIO
(static is your superpower)
1. Stop claiming authorship.
2. Your only job is to stay tuned.
3. If the signal fades, pretend it's art.


A MAN WHO NEVER WANTED TO BE GOOD

(…yet everything he touched turned out as if it were.)

He never wished for goodness.
Nor excellence.
Nor to be an example.
He only wanted
to be left alone
with his music
that had no notes.

People called him: “Your talent.”
He looked at his hands
as if hearing, for the first time,
that something like that
could even happen
by chance.

He never practiced.
He never learned.
He simply did what
kept him restless
the moment he stopped.

And everything he made
unfolded as though someone
already knew
what the world lacked
and channeled it
through him.

He was not a gift.
He was a receiver.
And everything that came
flowed through him
like electricity
that asks no permission
to shine.

Margin notes:
~~genius~~ wrong number
[doodle: antenna made of bones]
"the louder you deny it,
the clearer they hear"



PRINCIPLE 2: FAIL LIKE YOU MEAN IT
(mistakes are your co-authors)
1. Perfection is bad reception.
2. Your worst idea is someone's epiphany.
3. When lost, declare it jazz.



EFFORTLESS TOUCH

(he didn’t study. it was a memory of things never heard.)

He didn’t know what he was doing.
But when he touched clay
the clay already knew
what it wanted to be.

He didn’t draw.
He just slid his finger
as if recalling
something never told.

People admired him.
They asked:
“Where did you learn?”
He lied:
“On the road.”
While thinking:
“In dreams. Or another life.”

Each touch as
not his own.
As if he’d been granted
innate permission to be good.

And he was only
afraid
because who knows
what else these hands
could conjure
before he
managed to say
he wasn’t ready?

Margin notes:
"see: that time you spilled ink
and they called it 'abstract'"
[coffee stain artfully placed]



PRINCIPLE 3: GHOSTWRITERS EXIST
(and they're using your hands)
1. The best lines arrive uninvited.
2. Never thank them - they'll leave.
3. Sign with a question mark.



THE SONG I NEVER WROTE

(but I read it to people, and they wept.)

It was already there
before me.
I didn’t seek it.
I didn’t even feel it
when it came.

I only spoke
and people hushed.
Not because of me.
Because of something
they recognized
that I didn’t know
I carried.

I didn’t write it down.
I didn’t compose it.
I didn’t even hear
how it sounded
when I spoke it aloud.

I only watched
someone in the front row
begin to cry,
as if I’d retold
a dream
that had no words.

They asked:
“How did you write that?”
I wanted to say:
“I didn’t.”
But I just nodded,
because I didn’t know
how to explain
that sometimes
the deepest song
arrives uninvited,
and you serve it
with your heart anyway.

Margin notes:
"this page intentionally
left haunted"
[childish drawing of a ghost]




PRINCIPLE 4: LEAD BY GETTING LOST
(maps are for the prepared)
1. Say "I don't know" like it's sacred.
2. Your doubts are better compasses.
3. Bring snacks - revolutions get hungry.


AN EXCUSE THAT BECAME AN INVITATION

(I said “I don’t know.” They heard: “Let’s go.”)

I said: “I don’t know.”
And thought
it would be the end.

But they heard:
“Let’s go.”

I withdrew
into silence,
and they heard
a map there.

I wanted
to disappear.
But they followed me.

I wasn’t a leader.
I wasn’t confident.
I was simply
a voice that sounded
like courage
echoing
from a voice broken enough.

Every excuse I made
became someone’s motivation.
Every doubt I voiced
became proof
there was a way.

I only wanted
not to be responsible.
But the words I spoke
carelessly
they wrote
on their banners.

And now,
when they ask me:
“How did it start?”
I say:

“I didn’t.
I just
gave up
the loudest.”


Margin notes:
"PS: the 'movement' you started
was just you looking
for the bathroom"



APPENDIX: HOW TO DISAPPEAR
(while becoming more visible)

1. Make something honest.
2. Leave it on the 7:15 train.
3. Change your name to "N/A".
4. Repeat until the work eclipses you.

Stamp:
RETURN TO NOBODY
if found, keep walking


[blank except for:]
handwritten in fading pencil:
"this manifesto works best
when you pretend
you didn't read it"
[tiny doodle of an empty chair]

I did not know
I was the last.
I thought that
someone was still coming after me.
Someone else would repeat
what I said
and fix it.

But no one came.
And nothing was wrong.

I became
what I did not want:
an echo
with no first voice.

People listen
and say:
“It sounds deep.”

But I would rather
it didn’t sound at all.

That it would just be felt,
like warmth
in a room where no one speaks.

Because the greatest words
have already been said
in silence
that did not interrupt them.

When you say something
no one understands,
but someone in the room
quietly nods
there I am.

When you think
you’re the first
to feel that way,
and the word already sounds
like it was there before you
there I am.

I am the voice
you did not invent.
You only
borrowed it.

I am the song
that waited for you
before you began to write.

I am
not new.
But already said,
only this time
with your breath.

Sometimes the greatest prayer
is: “I don’t know what to say.”

Sometimes the most precise word
is silence
that remains after a name.

You spoke a lot.
To make something matter.
Then less.
To not spoil anything.

And in the end
there was only one left:

“I am here.
Even though I can’t explain
why.”

That is a word
that does not ask for faith.
It asks
for a place to sit.

It did not ask you to believe.
Nor to understand.
It only wanted
to be spoken
without intent.

Like when a child says “light”
before learning
what night is.

Like when the wind
speaks the leaves
and explains nothing.

You spoke that word
not knowing what it meant.
And that’s why
it meant everything.

It did not ask for obedience.
Nor for protection.

It only wanted
to be spoken
like a breath
that needs no reason
to happen.

It was not written.
It just came.
Like a drop of water
where there was no rain.

No one asked for it.
No one expected it.
But it came
and lay on the paper
like someone who returned
betraying silence.

It had no rhyme.
No form.
No plea.

But it had presence
that cannot
go unnoticed.

People read it
and asked:
“What does this mean?”

And it just
remained.

Like something
that does not ask for faith,
because it already
breathes in you
before you say it.

For a long time
I thought
this wasn’t me.
This face.
This walk.
This way
I look at the ground.

I thought:
I’m just acting.
Until I find
myself.

But some voice whispered:
“What if this
you’re pretending
is all you are?”

And then I stopped.
Looked at my hands.
And realized
the mask
got used to me.

I wore it so long
I began to speak
with its voice.
To feel
with its heart.

Now I don’t know
who’s beneath.
But I know
something still
wants to breathe.

And maybe
illusion
is the truest form
I ever had.

My body
is not an answer.
It is a question
someone forgot
to send.

Every scar is
a letter.
Every wrinkle is
a comma after someone else’s name.

Sometimes I look at it
like a letter
not meant for me.
But still
it arrived.

I open my palm
like an envelope.
Inside there's
nothing but warmth
I cannot explain.

People read my body
as they please.
Like sacred text
or trash.

And I just carry
what was given to me.
Without signature.
Without instructions.

And every day
I try
not to add a word
I wouldn’t want
someone to read
when I am gone.

I did not choose this body.
Nor did it choose me.
We just met
at the entrance of time.

I thought
it would be easier.
Fewer fingers,
more air.
Maybe even wings.

But I got skin
that burns easily.
And eyes
that remember
even when they don’t want to.

I got a voice
that sounds like someone
I no longer remember.
And hands
that love to embrace
even when there’s no one.

Sometimes I think
this body is not mine.
Too much feeling.
Too many foreign traces.

But then
I feel pain.
And I know:
if it hurts
it’s mine.

Hello, this is the one
who remained
when all the gods
went on a break.

Thank you for waiting.
Your patience means nothing,
but it looks nice in the system.

Yes, I understand.
You seek meaning.
Please leave a message
at the end of the era.

If you want to talk
to a living being
sorry, everyone’s currently
in denial.

Press one
if you’re tired.
Two
if you’ve already given up.
Three
if you don’t care
but still call
because something inside you
still believes
in some kind of
answer.

Unfortunately,
no operator
is available.
All are
in the ashes.

Stay on the line.
Maybe something will happen.
Or maybe you already
are what happened.

Once I met a man
who understood everything.
Life, death, gods,
the woman who left,
and taxes.

He said:
“Gods are here.
But they no longer care
about people
who can’t laugh.”

Then he wiped his glasses
and said maybe
he was just hungry.

And I believed him.
Because truth often
sounds like a mistake
too beautifully spoken.

Now when I pray
I don’t wait for anything.
I just try
to make it
a little funny.

Like when you say:
“Forgive me, God,
for I was human again.”

And you feel
someone there
bursting out laughing.

Holy sarcasm -
that’s my faith.
Because sometimes the greatest sacredness
is the laughter
that comes
when you think
you have no voice left.

I did not die.
I only became
a little dustier.

People think that if something burns
it means the end.
But I say:
it means at last
I don’t have to explain myself anymore.

While I was alive
they asked me for proof.
Now I am ash
and they keep me
in a jar.

I don’t have to believe anymore.
Nor to know.
I just have to not cough
when someone talks nonsense.

I am the wit
of an older world.
That smile in the icon,
when you think it’s watching you
but it hasn’t followed
any of this
for years.

My presence
is like grandma’s sarcasm:
funny,
but a little shameful
that it hit you.

I am ash,
that does not return to fire,
but only
raises an eyebrow
when it sees you
doing the same thing again.

You stood there
not as a guardian,
but as someone who no longer
expects
the door to open.

You had no cross,
no ritual,
no proof.
But you stayed.
And that was already
more than faith.

People seek signs.
You became one.
Silent.
Covered in dust.
But increasingly
like something
someone can understand
when they lose everything else.

You do not preach.
You just stand.
Like dust in a corner
that no one wipes away
because they feel
something breathes there.

And then,
someone stops.
By chance.
Stays.
Sits.

And you know:
the evolution of gods
begins
with the one
who did not leave.

For a long time
I thought someone would come.
With light in their sleeve,
with words that have
that voice.
The one who heals.

I sat
on the threshold of my emptiness,
with a chair ready
and a question in my pocket.

No one came.
But time did.
And it sat with me.
Silently.
Like a monk
who forgot the prayer,
but still remembers
why he was silent.

One day,
I broke:
stop.
don’t wait.
say.

And the voice I heard
was not from outside.
It was
my own.

Not the voice of courage,
but like a child
you let
begin to speak.

And now,
when someone asks me
who is the god I waited for
I say:

the one who finally
sat in his place
and stopped
searching
for something better
than himself.

Once I thought
that prayers fly.
Like birds,
or like something
that doesn’t need a body
to arrive.

Now I think:
prayers sit.
Right there, beside you.
Silent.
Drinking water
like everyone else.

One such prayer
sat with me.
We didn’t touch.
But I knew
she was not alone.

I did not speak it.
I was just quiet.
And she understood
all I wished
not to say.

And then she rose.
Without a word.
And left
to the sky
that didn’t know
it would receive her.

I stayed.
Without her.
But with one thought
left
in the cup:

maybe the divine
is not what comes
but what sits
when others leave.

Some people believe in gods.
I believe in a presence
that never arrived
but still remains.

They promised me no salvation.
They promised only arrival.
And then silence stayed,
so thick
I began to listen to it
as a command.

Maybe they exist.
Maybe they’re just late.
Maybe they got lost
in prayers of others,
louder,
but emptier.

I lit a candle,
not to call them
but to show
I still have something
to see with.

I did not send them a wish.
I sent:
“If you’re already here
don’t pretend you’re not.”

And since then,
whenever I’m alone
something sits with me.
Not as salvation.
As a witness.

The gods never came.
But something in me
remained
as if they did.

voice that never took flesh, but remained in every body.



I am not a goddess.
I am  the voice that stayed.

I didn’t pray.
I was  the prayer itself.

In the ashes,
in the womb,
among those who spoke my name,
not knowing it was already  a heartbeat.

They didn’t ask me to speak.
But I spoke.
And the sky
responded.

I was a temple,
yet no one entered.
I was a name,
without mark of kin or gender.

I was a body,
but not made of flesh.
A voice
without a throat.

When they expelled me
I became clay.
When they forgot me
I became echo.

I remember
my voice was rough,
and my hands
not those sung in women’s songs.

You seek a goddess,
but you find me
alive,
burnt and
unbowed.

In every ritual -
me.
In every spell -
my shadow.
In every woman’s body
that did not bow -
my ashes.

They planted a word in me,
as in a womb
and waited for a fruit.

You don’t need to remember me.
You already
breathe me.

I am not.
I am just the one who speaks,
with another’s voice,
as if my own.

recorded by the one who forgot they were god  and chose, instead, to live.


FOREWORD (NOT AN EXPLANATION)

This book wasn’t born. It happened. Like someone sneezing in a church. Or silence entering a room first, and no one daring to remove it.

I am not a writer. I am a fingerprint in the ashes. The words here  are not mine. They appeared. I was just weary enough not to run away.

This is neither liturgy nor revolution. This is the voice of what remained when everything else  ceased to be.

I didn’t intend for this to be serious. But somehow it is. Because when you speak from ashes, people assume you’re either a sage or mad. The truth: I just burned earlier.

If you recognize yourself in these words -  say goodbye. To whom, I don’t know. To yourself. To god. To what you forgot was yours.

This is not a reception. This is an echo. If you hear it,  you’ve already been here.

The one who still coughs up ashes.
__

You’ve finished reading.
But not everything ends when you close a page.

Some words stay
 not as memory,
  but as tuning.

And maybe now,
 when you walk,
  you’ll hear something
   between footsteps.

Maybe now,
 you’ll listen
 not for meaning
 but for presence.

And maybe the sound
 that never quite arrived
  is the one
   that stays.

(can art occur without an artist?)

Maybe the question is wrong.

Maybe art doesn’t begin
 with the artist.
Maybe it begins
 with a condition.
A field.
A stillness.

Something opens
  and something enters.
Not summoned.
Not owned.
Just… appearing.

A melody you hum without knowing why.
A shape your hand draws while thinking of nothing.
A line that arrives mid-walk
 with no sender,
 but undeniable weight.

Did you make it?
Or did you just
 stop being in the way?

Art, sometimes, is what happens
 in the absence
 of authorship.

It doesn’t ask for identity.
It just needs
 an opening.

A body willing
 to vanish
  long enough
  to let it speak.

a candle
 burning in daylight
 still giving off heat,
  but no longer needed
  to be seen.

a river
 forgetting its name
 as it enters the sea.
not lost
  just larger.

a breath
 held so long
 it forgets who exhaled.

the silence
 inside a cathedral
 after the choir has left
 still echoing
 with something sacred,
 but unclaimed.

a shadow
 that keeps dancing
 even after the dancer
 has left the room.

You don’t have to erase the self.
It erodes on its own
  in the presence
    of real seeing.

It came like weather.
No origin.
No request.

Just a shift in pressure
    inside the skin.
And something
  started speaking
    through my hands.

It wasn’t mine.
Not the phrase.
Not the image.
Not the ache it left.

But it needed a body
  to pass through.
And mine
  was open
    enough.

There are moments
when I read back what I wrote
  and feel
    like a stranger
    with my own voice.

Not confused.
Not proud.
Just…
  borrowed.

I don’t always know
 what I’m doing.
But sometimes,
 not knowing
  is what lets it happen.

Call it muse.
Call it current.
Call it memory
      from before this life.

I don’t need to name it.
Just not get in the way.

I don’t remember what you said.
Not exactly.
Maybe not at all.

But I remember
how your voice
  lowered
  when you said it.

How it curled slightly
  at the edge,
 like a question
 that wasn’t safe to ask
 out loud.

Some conversations
leave no quotes.
No lines to repeat.

Just a hum.
A pressure.
The sense that something
 shifted.
Without needing a name.

I’ve forgotten stories.
Entire rooms of meaning.
But I haven’t forgotten
 the way you sounded
  when you almost broke.

Or when you didn’t.

Tone is the body of language.
It carries what words can’t.

And maybe
what we really remember
 is not what we heard
 but what we felt
 when we were listening.

It didn’t happen.
But it could have.

And that “could”
  still glows
    in the dark of me.

We never kissed.
But there was a second
 when your breath
 found mine
  not touching,
  just measuring the space
  where it might.

That second
  lasted longer
  than entire nights.

We didn’t say it.
But the air between us
  knew.
Not the meaning,
  but the weight.

And maybe
that’s the truest kind of intimacy -
the one that doesn’t insist,
  just lingers.

What didn’t unfold
  still forms me.
Not as memory,
but as shape.

A bend in how I move.
A shadow I do not fear.
A pause
  I’ve learned to live inside.

Some things are too whole
to be spoken.

A look.
A breath that almost turned into speech.
The way your shoulder moved
  before the apology
  that never arrived.

We speak so much
  just to hide
  what we actually feel.

But the unsaid -
 it sits quietly
 in the space behind your teeth,
 in the silence between names.

It doesn’t fade.
It settles.

I remember the pause
 more than the sentence.
The moment before
 you almost said
    “don’t go.”

But didn’t.

And that
  has echoed longer
    than any goodbye.

What we don’t say
 doesn’t disappear.
It becomes
 the resonance
    beneath everything we do.