The air cleaves, static-thick—
a fuselage of sound lacerates the hush,
metal entrails rupturing sky,
the aftershock draping itself
over a man who once outran
a city’s collapse.

His ribs still bear the weight
of the bomb that did not **** him.
His breath—
a fissure splintering
through the wet hush of memory.
The war remembers him
before he remembers the war.

Elsewhere, a child flinches
at the snarl of firecrackers,
cinders curling their tongues through the air.
The smell of burning skin never quite leaves—
it lingers in the architecture of memory,
in the way hands recoil from heat
long after scars have paled.

And then, there is me—

Not sirens.
Not gunfire.
Not calamity’s echo.

A clock does not tick.
It gnaws—
a scalpel carving time into my marrow,
chewing at the walls of existence.
Its rhythm—
an elegy for the unstirred,
a pulse of urgency
lodged between my teeth.

The city writhes in metallic discord—
horns braying like gutted creatures,
steel nerves shrieking beneath
the weight of their own impatience.
Traffic thickens into a thrumming fever,
pressing against the skull,
a needling static unraveling thought.

Crowds surge, faceless, voiceless—
speech dissolving into the blur of motion,
gestures hollowing into gestures,
the world slipping into a reel
that plays too fast,
then too slow,
then too fast again.

But the loudest sound,
the one that cleaves me in half,
is the one that does not exist—

Silence.

Where thought unspools unchecked,
where absence carries its own gravity.
A hush so vast
it stretches skin thin over bone,
so boundless
it becomes deafening.