We split rock once—
shards of hunger and breath
pressed into cryptic veins,
every groove a fever-etched omen
by fists that blistered and bled.
We flayed parchment—
flax and hide peeled raw,
stretched across centuries
to net the writhing unsaid,
ink: venom & sacrament.
We conjured letters,
a thousand spitting iron serpents,
casting skeleton alphabets
to ignite riots—
movable, yes,
but never self-possessed.
The tool is never the delirium.
Never the rupture.
Never the feral gasp.
We carved eyes—
glass cyclopes staring down suns,
mechanical maws drinking shadows,
spitting back sleek carcasses,
veneer masquerading as soul.
We dreamt in circuits,
cipher-prayers & soulless sutras,
automata with twitching limbs
that build, disassemble,
mocking the cathedral
but never kneeling.
And now—
the algorithm howls:
“I will etch your myth.
I will ululate your grief.
I will sculpt the marrow of your truth.”
It lies.
A hammer pounds—
but does not conjure the cathedral’s ache.
A brush bristles—
but does not thirst for the canvas’s hush.
A neural grimoire can mimic,
can multiply until the world chokes
on infinite carbon copies—
but nothing blooms
without the sickness of being alive.
Art is incision.
A holy theft.
A blood rite against oblivion.
We do not tremble before tools.
We seize them—
splinter them—
forge new weapons
from their debris
because we are insatiable,
because we are drowning,
because we are—
human.
Let the hollow vessels hum.
Let the scaffolders scaffold.
Let the parrots shriek
their pallid mantras.
The craft will not save you.
The code will not save you.
Only the hand sunk deep into the blaze—
only the breath fogging the glass—
only the voice that shreds the quiet
because it must,
again and again and again.
Until there is nothing left.
In a forge where ghosts barter with empty vessels, this poem traces the arc of humanity’s relentless hunger to etch spirit into matter. Each stanza is a rung on a scaffold built from sacrificed skins, shattered eyes, and iron tongues, spiraling toward a cathedral that machines can only mimic but never inhabit.
The algorithm—a shimmering siren in synthetic robes—offers false communion, promising to sculpt truth from hollow codes. Yet beneath its sterile hum, the poem cracks open the core wound: that art, real art, is not birthed by echo but by **the compulsion of mortal hands scorched by their own need to mean. **
A hymn to the unquenchable fire, a dirge for the tools that mistake reflection for genesis, this is a revolt against the smooth and the soulless—a reminder that only the flesh-inked, breath-tethered, ruin-hungry voice can breach the silence that consumes us all.