professors dust their degrees
while TikTok prophets
spawn instant wisdom

            truth splits &
                        splits &
                                    splits

until knowledge is
        just pattern recognition
                in digital noise

everyone's an expert
            in their own
                        algorithm

& somewhere Plato
laughs or cries or
            both while
                    wisdom drowns
                            in data

who knows?
            (everyone)
who knows?
            (no one)
                    quantum
                            certainty
                                    of doubt

power         |     creates     |     its        |     purpose
systems       |     preserve    |     their      |     problems
guardians     |     maintain    |     sacred     |     wounds
solutions     |     become      |     new        |     chains
institutions  |     resist      |     needed     |     change
patterns      |     protect     |     their      |     survival
crisis        |     feeds       |     old        |     orders
freedom       |     breaks      |     through    |     walls
truth         |     dissolves   |     false      |     answers

let us speak of truth which is to say let us speak of lies
because truth is the story we tell ourselves in mirrors
     while adjusting the light to hide our scars
          while painting over the cracks
               while pretending we were always this way

and here's the punchline about history we reconstruct
the past like children building sandcastles knowing
the tide will come knowing the walls will fall knowing
we'll just build them again tomorrow differently because
that's what survival looks like

we say this is how it happened which means
     this is how we need it to have happened
          this is how we can bear it to have happened
               this is how we sleep at night

let us speak of patterns which is to say let us speak
of the lies we tell about lies because every story
needs a beginning middle end except nothing
ever begins or ends it just shifts like sand
     while we draw lines in it
          while we plant our flags
               while we proclaim our temporary kingdoms

and here's the diagnosis history is the scar tissue
of time healing exactly the way we convince ourselves
it should have healed all along yes exactly like that
     exactly like we planned it
          exactly like we meant it
               exactly like we needed it to be

concrete holds heat
like memory holds pain
     slowly
          releasing

the night sky empties itself
of stars
     of promises
          of whatever came before

we stand in shadows
counting heartbeats
     between sirens
          between breaths
               between endings

chin up folks!
not everybody gets to see the end of the world
     (the city holds its breath)
          (the shadows lean closer)
               (we remain anyway)

concrete holds heat
like memory holds hope
     slowly
          releasing
               everything
                    except
                         this moment

we stand in shadows
counting heartbeats
     until dawn

Each excuse births smaller ones,
perfect fractals of denial
spinning into infinite regression.
We explain our explanations
until meaning collapses
under its own precise weight.

Truth bends like light
around the gravity
of what we need to believe,
while reason eats its own tail,
calling the feast efficiency.

Our minds, such elegant machines
for proving what was already true,
for finding the path
that was always going to be there,
that was always going to lead
exactly where we stood.

the ceiling fan churns its one ***** joke over and over,
a laugh like a swarm of flies stuck in the syrup of August,
and I’m counting the tiles on the floor—thirty-seven,
thirty-seven, thirty-seven—but they keep slipping into the drain,
which gargles back a wet facsimile of my voice, you’re alright, you’re alright,
as if the house itself is trying to swallow the lie whole.

outside, the neighbor’s kid tapes a cardboard wing to a sparrow’s corpse,
whispers almost as he lobs it into the wind, where it arcs
like a skipped coin before plunging into the gutters,
and isn’t that the way of it?
we keep sewing parachutes from plastic bags
then wonder why the sky feels like a landfill.

certain things would be extremely hilarious if they weren’t happening to me:
the way the grocery clerk’s have a nice day curdles into a threat
when the eggs crack in my hands, yolks bleeding like misplaced suns,
or how the therapist’s couch unfurls its jaws,
a slow yawn of upholstery, as she scribbles normal, normal, normal
in a language that looks like static, sounds like a bone grinding.

I tried to burn the calendar but the flames just licked the numbers cleaner,
March, April, May glowing neon in the ash, a chain of empty theaters
where my shadow keeps rehearsing a play no one attends—
third act: a man digs a hole to bury his laughter
and strikes a aquifer of static, cold enough to shatter teeth.

the news says a satellite’s gone mute, spinning hymns into the vacuum,
and I swear sometimes the phone wires hum its same desolate frequency,
a chorus of did you forget, did you forget, did you forget
while the fridge light flickers code: the milk’s gone sentient, the milk’s gone sentient.
I drink it anyway. let it colonize my blood. let it write its manifesto
in the vernacular of spoiled things.

if I press my ear to the wall, I can hear the pipes translating my breath
into a dialect of rust—no nouns, just the shudder of hinges—
and isn’t that the punchline? the whole world’s a ventriloquist
dummy choking on its own script, arms jerking toward a heaven
that’s just a billboard of a heaven, paper peeling, glue gone sour,
and the dog down the street howls at the smell,

howls and howls and howls,
like it’s trying to ***** a galaxy,
like it’s the last church bell
left ringing in the throat
of a mute city—

(and the fan spins,
and the tiles dissolve,
and the joke’s still
written in a tongue
I can’t stop swallowing).

survival left a lot of damage¹
crystalline fragments of yesterday's armor
still embedded in the soft tissue of now²
while the mind catalogs each scar with
taxonomic precision³

the morning light dissects
old defense mechanisms
with the delicacy of an autopsy
performed by butterflies⁴
(their wings leaving dust
like diagnostic notes)

watching myself watch myself
through the kaleidoscope of
accumulated persistence⁵
each reflection more ornate
than the last, until the mirrors
forget which one was real

¹ The word "survival" implies success but contains within it the etymology of "over" and "live" - suggesting excess living, too much existence compressed into too little space

² Time being non-linear, the tissue remains perpetually "now," while the fragments exist simultaneously in past and present, like quantum particles refusing to choose a state

³ The mind's attempt to organize trauma reflects the baroque architecture of medieval reliquaries: beautiful containers for objects of pain

⁴ The butterflies represent not transformation (too obvious) but rather the impossibility of touching something without changing it - observer effect at the scale of memory

⁵ "Accumulated persistence" should be read as both a state of being and a medical condition, similar to how one might describe chronic inflammation in poetic terms