Bite down ******* my tongue, the hiss between channels—
shards of unspoken words rattle in my jaw,
half-born specters of what-could-be,
swallowed before they can crawl into light.

You.
You.
Carving hieroglyphs in the meat of my chest—
soft flame against black walls,
smoke signals I can’t decipher.
You unmake me with hands that don’t even know
what they’re holding.

Silence is a weapon.
Silence is a fistful of razors.
Fear grows teeth in the shadows,
glass splinters fracturing into weapons
before the crack, before the shatter.

And I keep it locked—this thing, this ache,
this soft, bleeding confession choking
on its own edges behind my teeth.
Because words are dangerous.
Because you don’t know the shape of my ruin
and I don’t want you to see
the mess of it spilled between us.

So I swallow.
Again and again.
And hope one day you’ll
read the maps I’ve etched
into the silence
of my breaking.

Once I believed in all I was told,
Magic was real, its truth so bold.
Then came a voice, cold and near,
Santa Claus? The Tooth Fairy?
"That stuff... no way," it sneered in my ear.

What? Not true?
My mind, a tempest, not knowing what to do.
So what else is false, what else must I doubt?
Tell me, tell me, what’s the truth, all laid out?

“Well, all that’s hollow, empty and gray,
The rest? It’s all just smoke and play.”
Years passed, and I walked this land,
Where magic lay buried beneath the sand.

But then, a moment,
sharp and clear,
I saw the fool I had been, year after year.
It was time to shuffle the cards once more,
Yet still the fool, I remained at my core.

Chasing a butterfly, so swift, so bright,
But now I must grapple with a deeper fight,
The bitter truth, the lesson to grasp:
Vomiting out the apple, at last.

I remember being 10 days clean
FINALLY off of Methamphetamine.
My daughter, she was 9 days new
we were living in my hospital room.
Then someone told me my kids dad
had smoked just one last time; I was mad.
See his teeth were killing him that day
and **** is best at taking pain away.
Then the addict inside me saw its chance to use.
It said "I want one last time too!"


They took her from me three months after that,
I swore up and down though, that I'd get her back.
Weeks and months came then passed,
they turned into years now.
Gone by too fast.
If I could go back I would make the right choice,
I'd silence that evil addicts voice.
But instead what I said on that day was
"I deserve one last time without any fuss."
I really thought it would be fine,
I thought I'd get right back in line.
Now 6 years later as I write,
It's 4:33 am I've been awake all night.
Because "one last time" never stays that way.
And I regret that "one last time"
EVERY
single
day.