Pulse as tether.
Mind, a blade dulled on bone.
Ash drips from the ceiling of thought
no light, only the hiss of burned names.

Tongues calcify in jars of dusk.
Flesh remembers what silence forgot.
Smoke blooms in the mouth of sleep.
Pain suckles the root,
wants nothing but to stay.

Grief is a handless clock
still turning.
Still carving
where nothing remains soft.

They breathe in steel,
lungs filled with smoke
from the hollow of forgotten cities,
where rust is the only voice they know.

Hands scrape skin,
too cold to touch
fingerprints burned to wire,
in a song no one remembers.

The streets bleed
in rhythms that never leave
boots press the pulse flat,
repeating orders not their own.

A child’s cry,
a fracture in the dark,
but they hear only
the grinding of their feet,
the hum of metal on metal
and nothing more.

I live,
but it is not life.
A corpse cradles your love,
too cold to feel,
too empty to remember
the warmth of a touch
that never reached me.

Your love is a wound,
a thing I carve into my chest,
a knife I hold with trembling hands,
cutting deeper
with every breath.
There is no blood,
only a slow seep of darkness
that fills me,
blackening my veins,
eclipsing what’s left of light.

I wear your love like a shroud,
its fabric too thin to protect,
too heavy to carry,
dragging me deeper into the earth
where the air suffocates
and the ground weeps with regret.
Every step I take
sinks further
into the weight of you,
your absence that clings like rot,
a scent too putrid to escape,
too constant to ignore.

I hold your love,
but it is not love,
it is a thorn lodged in my ribs,
the poison seeping through my skin,
numbing,
filling me with a hunger
too dark to feed.

The silence between us is a scream,
a scream that never cracks the air,
but claws at the inside of my skull,
twisting my thoughts into ghosts,
my words into ashes
that fall before they reach the ground.

I live in the ruins of you,
a ruin that was never built to stand,
its foundation cracked with promises
too broken to rebuild.
And still,
I stand in the rubble,
a monument to your absence,
to a love that was never real,
a love that only took
and never gave.

I carry your pain,
but it is not pain,
it is a hollow weight,
a deep, infinite hole
where my heart should be,
a chasm that screams your name
with no voice to echo.

Still, I live,
but I do not.
I am a shadow of what was,
a flicker of what could never be,
and the air around me thickens,
filling with the stench of a love
that was never mine to begin with.

Let me drink the light your eyes have touched,
A glimpse to still the tremor in my veins.

A splintered moon shatters in my eye,
its fragments sinking into the marrow.
Beneath, the earth cracks open,
teeth gnawing at roots that had no names.

My breath is smoke,
dissolving in a throat too old to speak.
Flesh crumbles like ash,
a flame that failed to burn.

A voice calls from the dark,
but it is dust before it reaches me.
I am left—a map of wounds no one can read.

Your name seeps through the dusk,
a tremor coiled in the marrow of stars.
The wind unravels your touch—tender, but smoldering,
like an ember defying ash.

Distance etches its weight in sinew,
but even in this severance,
I taste the brine of your voice—a phantom tide,
summoning me home.

The strings quiver-a broken body in silk,
nails pressed to wood
like bruises that refuse to fade.

A melody bleeds,
sharp notes rip through skin,
veins unravel in cold ink.

Drums crack time open,
tremor down too slow
to outrun the black.
Shadows gather,
drowning the air.

A voice rises-strangled, fractured,
singing what lungs can’t reach.
Each chord a blade,
carving its name into bone.

And when it ends,
silence screams louder
than the song that tore me apart.