Everything bleached—
the words, the memory of words,
the tongue flattened beneath the weight
of what must not be spoken. A surrender
of sound, a silence that tastes like salt
pressed into a wound
you forgot to name.

Here—
the iodine threads through the dirt—
it burns its way backward,
into a childhood—
is it mine? I do not know—
that never grew
out of its scabs, that curled itself
into a tight fist
of unhealed skin.

The razors, though—
they moved like swifts, like
unseen birds
cutting through the air
too fast to stop—
their kisses, their strange
geometry of ruin.

And the grown-ups, their words—
or were they storms?
or the echo of gods?—
"You must obey, or vanish.
You must obey, or
learn to die of shame."
And so—
the body folds itself inward,
like paper, like
a breath no one will miss.

Do you feel it?
The guilt—
its slender fingers
tightening, as if around
the throat of a world.
The shame—its small
knife-point etching
names you did not choose
into the chest.
The way the chest carries it—
silent, but
with the weight of centuries.

"Tell the story," they said.
"Make it better.
Make it sing." But
their mouths are full
of echo, their threats
like waves breaking
against a cliff you can’t stop
dreaming of.

I want to write the dirt.
The cuts.
The razors in their perfect arcs.
I want to write the gods
that were not gods, the voices
that were not mine.
The grace—
noose-like, tightening—
but not the gilded lie
of endings.

Instead, a fire:
its single purpose,
its clear burning.
Not to erase, but to
scar. To carve me
out of this
bleached photograph, this
ghost-sky still
blistering my hands.

Let it end in the crackle of ash,
the body emerging—
not whole, but here,
a scarred brightness walking
into the unfinished dawn.