Nobody knows the secrets.
Not the ones that fester like open wounds,
not the ones that slither through my teeth at night,
curling around my gums like parasites,
whispering names I swore I'd forget.

They live in the marrow, crackling like frostbite,
in the weight of a swallowed scream,
in the shadow that bends wrong in the mirror.
They don’t sleep.
They don’t die.
They just rot.

The raven comes when the night is thick,
when the walls lean in like old drunks,
when the wind hums a funeral hymn.
Perched on my ribs, claws sunk deep,
he pecks at the soft parts—
at memories wrapped in barbed wire,
at the dreams I stitched shut,
at the roads that led nowhere but back to myself.

He drips black ink into my lungs,
each breath a smear, a stain, a confession.
"You’ve carried them too long," he says,
but I can’t let go.
Not yet.
Not ever.

Secrets like these don’t dissolve.
They calcify.
They sink into the bones,
settle in the cracks of the skull,
etch themselves into the eyes of the dead.

I see them when I sleep
cities swallowed by dusk,
faces shifting like smoke,
hands reaching from doorways that never existed.
I dream of places I’ve never been,
but somehow remember
the gutter stink, the broken streetlight hum,
the damp crawl of something breathing beneath the floorboards.

The raven knows.
He picks at my silence,
spreads his wings,
and the room dissolves into black feathers,
falling slow as ashes from a fire that never stops burning.

I wake up gasping,
lungs full of fog,
mouth full of dirt,
secrets clawing at the walls of my throat.

One day, they’ll consume me.
One day, I’ll open my mouth and nothing will come but smoke.
One day, I’ll be nothing but echoes and dust,
and the raven will sit on my bones,
whispering all the words I was too afraid to say.