With each step I take,
I am closer to the dark light.
Each heartbeat leads me
to the finality.

Conceived without pain,
I am trying to find the lost moment.
Your naked hands roam freely
over my frail body -
hatred is what
the smallest ones desire.

Painfully cursed, today
I end this wicked journey
for something that no one knows.
I have become lost
to the world.

My condescending tears
are too ridiculous to be of any use.
Your spasmodic whisper
tries to tame the night
that consistently plays with the light,
that asks for
a scrap of its own sadness.

Intoxicated with hope,
sold at a bargain price -
I try to overcome life in myself,
to find pain that will teach me
to yearn so that everyone
will envy me.

I was created from air and tears.
I was born from humility,
which is foreign
to this land, to unknown skies.

I do not want to be a dream
that disperses in darkness;
I do not want to remind of existence,
which misses the lie.

With each subsequent vision
I come closer to a universe
that, hastily invented, does not associate
with tenderness,
does not connect with silence.

Please think, before the last tear,
the definitive flame of a smile,
falls asleep in you.
My body, divided into chapters,
becomes an apocalypse,
for which it is worth visiting paradise,
admitting sadness.

I do not want the future
to belong entirely to me.
I do not want the reflections of shadows
to hurt my heart.

I watch your illusions furtively -
I am leaving this place, looking for
another penance.
I will no longer dance as the ballad desires,
as the dream indicates.

I will not become the foundation
for senses.

Leap years. Thoughts that will never
learn to fly. A chance
that will be reborn as pride
if time so decides.

I recognized you by the taste
of your lips - too sweet to be true.
I know there will come
a time when the eyes will forget
how to cry.

What I will have left of you is a tear
turned into amber,
a silent future, a cursed era.
There will be neither shadow
nor light anymore.

There will be no more silent breath,
suffering word, fog that fawns
on my bare knees.
Tomorrow we will wake up
on the other side of loneliness -
where forests burn,
where freedom becomes torment.

I tried to admit to a life
I did not commit. However, fate,
this incurable hypochondriac,
wanted to sentence me
to a lifetime of memory.

Beyond the barricades of memories,
grace, harnessed to heaven,
echoes back to me; somewhere inside
there are sleepless tears I will never
understand. I can't dream in a way
that would make the earth
kneel before me.

I dare not look in such a way
that the sky departs forever
into the unknown.
Time will forever remain a desert island.

his hands are cigarettes,
burning slow across the keys.
he plays like he’s trying
to empty something out of himself,
something heavy,
something he doesn’t trust
to speak aloud.

the crowd doesn’t notice.
they drink their whiskey,
laugh at their own jokes,
and hum along like they
understand the chords.

but I watch him,
the way his fingers tremble
like they’re afraid
of what comes next.
he’s in love with the piano,
or maybe he’s just stuck with it,
like a bad marriage
that refuses to end.

the music is sharp
and it hurts in all the right places,
like stepping on broken glass
but still feeling alive.
I want to tell him:
you don’t have to play for them,
they’re not listening.
play for yourself.
play to make the ghosts shut up.

but I don’t say anything.
I just watch him finish his set,
pack up his misery,
and leave the room
quieter than he found it.

they don’t wait for the grave.
they start digging
the moment you clock in.
a little deeper every day—
beneath the fluorescent lights,
beneath the bills piling up,
beneath the weight of everything
you were supposed to be
but never got around to.

they bury you early.
in offices,
in traffic jams,
in cheap apartments with walls
thin enough to hear your neighbors fighting.
in the same bar every Friday night,
where the jukebox keeps playing the same sad songs
and the bartender pours another round of regret.

they say,
“this is just life.”
and maybe they’re right—
maybe you’re supposed to carry
that invisible coffin on your back,
marching forward
like you don’t feel it getting heavier.

I knew a woman once.
she refused the shovel.
quit her job, sold her car,
got on a bus going anywhere.
people called her crazy.
but she sent me a postcard
from some small town by the ocean.
she said the air tasted like salt,
and she’d never felt more alive.

they bury you early.
unless you fight.
unless you throw the dirt back in their faces
and run like hell toward something,
anything,
that doesn’t feel like dying.

I'm afraid of failure
Of becoming a burden
But above all, I'm afraid
Of hurting the ones I love
And ending up alone...

Yet I'm here, I've shown
In the face of my demons
And screamed at them
That they'll never take
The very best of me

So I may not be fearless
I'm quite fine with that
For I'm brave

I caught myself in the mirror -
not really me,
just someone wearing my face.
they moved like a bad actor,
lines all wrong,
hands heavy,
feet borrowed.

I lit a cigarette,
watched the smoke curl
into the kind of shapes
I wish I could slip into.

I woke up again today.
the way a dog might wake up
to a kick.
not because I wanted to,
but because the hours don’t wait
and neither does the rent,
and no one cares
if you spend the morning drowning
in yesterday’s whiskey
and last year’s regrets.

the sun drips through the blinds,
thin and pale,
like it knows it’s wasting its light on me.
I light a cigarette,
watch the smoke twist,
and I wonder
how something so fragile
can disappear so easily—
then realize,
I’m not that different.

there’s a woman I loved once.
she had hair like wildfire
and eyes like a question I didn’t know how to answer.
she told me I was a storm
she wanted to walk into,
but she didn’t know
the rain never ends.
she packed her things on a Tuesday.
I tried to stop her,
but my hands were too heavy with all the things
I should’ve said when it mattered.

the world keeps moving forward,
dragging me behind it
like some forgotten wreckage.
I smile at strangers,
say I’m fine when they ask,
but every mirror I pass
whispers the truth:
you’re breaking
and no one even notices the sound.

some nights, I sit in the dark,
just to feel it wrap around me
like the arms I lost.
I drink until I forget,
and I drink until I remember.
it’s a cruel, stupid game,
but it’s the only one I’ve got left.

the thing no one tells you
about being alive
is that sometimes you’re not.
sometimes you’re just walking,
talking, breathing proof
of everything that’s gone wrong.

and when they ask me what I want,
what I need,
what I’m looking for,
I don’t have the words.
because what I want
is to go back,
and what I need
is for the pain to mean something.

but what I’m looking for—
God, what I’m looking for—
is the door out of this room.

and maybe,
just maybe,
someone who notices
I was even there
to close it.

When I was
20
I became
involved with
a married woman.
She said that
her husband was
abusive.
She was looking
for a way out
or a break.

She had the
most amazing eyes.
Wild and dark,
like a walnut, on fire.
She smelled like
the earth, sweat,
and wildflowers.
There was something
uncaged about her.

I was young
and naive.
I believed everything
and hoped too much.

The *** was
ferocious.
She taught me a lot.
We broke the
bed and took
bubble baths together.
It was a lavender love.

One day, she came
home with a balloon and
flowers.
She said we are
having a baby.
Those wild
eyes flashed pure joy.

My mom was
worried.
"She has a husband."
My mother was a realist.
She accepted it though,
even bought the woman
some gifts.

It didn't take long for
Amber to show a side
of her, I hadn't seen.
I caught her in some
small lies, and she became
violent when upset.

The affair ended.
She went back to
her husband.
It felt like my heart was
being
ripped out through
my nose.
Pain like a
rotting *****.

I remember talking to
a friend about it on
the phone,
pausing to *****.
It hurt so
******* bad.

Her sister called
me a week after
the split.
I asked about the
pregnancy.
It was all a lie.
She had a
hysterectomy a few
years earlier.

I still believe in people,
and hope too much,
and the years have made
me wiser.

I heard much
later that
she died at 40 of
lung cancer.
Those beautiful dark
eyes finally got
some rest.

the world’s got a habit
of chewing you up,
spitting you out
like a bad cigarette.
it doesn’t care
how many dreams you’ve got,
how many scars
you’ve earned.

people will smile at you,
talk about hope
like it’s something you can hold in your hands,
but they never mention
how it slips through your fingers
like sand
and disappears
before you can even grab it.

they tell you
there’s always a way out—
but you know better,
don’t you?
the exits are all locked
and the keys
are hidden in places
nobody bothers to look.

so you drink,
you smoke,
you **** up again and again,
and maybe you smile,
but it’s a lie,
a desperate lie,
just like everything else
they told you.

the truth?
the truth is,
no one’s coming to save you,
no one’s going to rewrite the rules,
no one’s going to put you back together
after you break.

you’ll just keep going,
because what else is there?
and the world will keep spinning,
chewing,
spitting,
until you’re nothing
but dust in its mouth.