it     starts with  
            a whisper       no — a            blink,  
the line — no, the edge— curls,
twisting like a thread that won’t stop unraveling
oh, it pulls at something deep,
something dark,
but soft—

            i am standing in the space  
where things don’t hold still,
the air bends — or is it me
bending it?
i try to speak but words bleed
out in
pieces —
broken sentences scatter, like
glass that never shatters.

"does it mean something?"
     i think it does.  
            but how could i know  
                       when time itself  
                    is        no longer  
                        the same?  
         clocks melt,  
                     but they don’t drip,  
                   they hum a sound  
       too far away to hear.  

        the sky— i think it’s still the sky—  
                  twists like a blanket  
           that never fully covers,  
   and underneath, there’s a door, but it doesn’t lead anywhere,  
   only back to a place i’ve been before,  
                  but forgotten how to leave.  

                 am i waiting?  
            or is this waiting for me?  

the mirror is smiling—
i didn’t know mirrors could smile,
or that they had teeth
but it’s there, behind me,
always behind—
trying to speak
but its words
are mine —
twisted backwards,
stretching,
thinning out like smoke.

there’s nothing to hold,
so i hold it all.

we are all half-formed,
tattered in the mouth of the sky,
footsteps scattered like secrets in sand
half-told stories,
flickering like the last candle before dawn.

where do the rivers begin?
do they unravel in the mind,
or do they stretch in the soil of forgotten stars?
your hands do not belong to you,
yet you hold them as though they are the
beginning of something
but where is the ending,
if endings are just names written on clouds?

i have been inside of nothing,
and it was vast,
expanding like a breath held too long,
too thick for the lungs of anyone to swallow.
do you remember the moment before you knew yourself?
was it light or was it dark?
perhaps it was both
perhaps it was neither.

you are a shape that never fits,
yet you force yourself into corners,
into frames,
into expectations
but the walls are always shifting,
always bending like light
through the cracked glass of your understanding.

and when you look in the mirror,
what do you see?
the reflection has no name,
no shape,
no breath.
it is you,
and not you.
it is a thing that waits to be known,
but cannot be touched.

what happens when the self forgets itself?
does it shatter, or does it simply vanish
into the silence of unspoken words,
into the places where truth never grows,
where light has no color,
where time is only a whisper
a dream that never wakes?

once, you were small enough to fit inside a whisper,
bones soft as moonlight,
fingers curled like question marks.
the world was too big to hold, so you clung to a name,
wrapped it around you like a second skin.

but nothing stays.

you learned that when your voice stretched,
when your laughter cracked open,
when the mirror started asking questions you couldn’t answer.

your hands,
look at them now
no longer tiny, no longer trembling,
big enough to shield your own eyes,
big enough to wipe your own tears.

the caterpillar never asks why it must split apart,
why the body it knew becomes a coffin,
why change feels like dying before it feels like flight.
but still, it unthreads itself into something else.
still, it breaks to become.

you will not be who you were yesterday.
you will not be who you are tomorrow.
but somewhere between the unraveling,
somewhere in the spaces left behind,
a pair of wings are forming.

the world hums in static.
your hands—are they yours?
does your voice sound the same to others as it does in your skull?
who told you that you are real, and why did you believe them?

breathe

the sun rises because it must.
because we expect it to.
because we have seen it do so before —
and so we trust the pattern.
but who winds the clock?
who decides the rhythm of the tide?
what if the moon is just pretending?

they told you:
gravity holds you down.
the past is unchangeable.
the body is the self.
(you nodded,
you swallowed,
you never checked the label)

breathe

your mind is a funhouse mirror,
stretching, warping, turning silhouettes into specters,
turning questions into monsters —
and we name them knowledge.

but if every fact was fed to you,
if every truth was a hand-me-down,
stitched together from dead men's words,
what have you ever known firsthand?

does fire burn if you don’t believe in it?

breathe

we talk in recycled language,
walk on secondhand roads,
dream in someone else’s vision.
but where does the script end?
where do you begin?

—if you peeled back the sky like wet paper,
would it bleed static or nothing at all?

what would you do with that kind of silence?

P- pages torn from books coated in prophesies  
R- razor blades slice through memories
O- open wounds drip crimson blood upon chalk stars
P- pen drawn runes coat your skin drawn in black ink
H- haloed in holy fire angels descended with knife blade wings
E- eyes gunmetal grey rimmed with puffy red highlights
T- they call you proclaimer, gods words carved into your bones.

they hand you the script before you can read,
press it into your small, shaking hands —
heavy, bound in iron-spined expectations,
dog-eared by generations who never asked why.

they teach you to walk with your shoulders squared,
chin high, voice deep, footsteps firm —
a monument before you are even a man.
they teach you that softness is a sickness,
that hunger is a virtue,
that the only way to be enough
is to be more, more, more—
and never too much.

you learn to swallow silence like whiskey,
bitter but burning,
learn that weight is worn like a crown,
that fear is something you bury,
not something you name.
you learn that strength is measured
in clenched fists and bitten tongues,
in carrying the world without letting it show
in the corners of your mouth.

they call it the masculine dream—
to build, to conquer, to become,
but the dream feels more like a tomb,
more like hands that push you forward
without asking if you want to move.
you wake up every morning and pull the mask on,
the one stitched from responsibility and expectation,
the one that fits too tight against your skin.

there is no room for breaking,
no space to be small,
no air for the boy you once were —
the one who ran barefoot through the grass,
who cried without shame,
who laughed without restraint.

they hand you the script,
but no one tells you how it ends.
only that you must not falter,
only that you must not fail.

only that a man must hold himself together—
even when the cracks run deep.

the wind hums like an old song,
but no one remembers the words.
once, they rang clear
soft voices, small hands,
feet bare against the earth,
before the dust turned to ash,
before the air tasted like rust.

the old therebefore,
when the world was wide,
when time was slow,
when a morning could stretch forever
and a night held no teeth.

once, the rain kissed open palms
without burning,
once, the sky bent low enough
to whisper secrets to the quiet.
once, a child could run
without knowing where,
without knowing why,
without the weight of knowing at all.

but the world teaches.
too early, too fast, too sharp
it carves lessons into skin,
shapes innocence into something brittle,
something that bends until it breaks.

the old therebefore,
when monsters only lived under beds,
not in boardrooms, not in uniforms,
not in the quiet spaces between words.

the old therebefore,
when promises meant something,
when love did not carry conditions,
when leaving was a choice,
not an inevitability.

but the past is a house
that no longer stands,
only the bones remain,
only the dust in the empty frame of a door
that once opened to something warm.

and yet
in the hush before sleep,
in the hush before waking,
the wind hums that old song again,
soft, quiet, waiting
for someone to remember.