I’ve left the oven on
for years.
Somewhere between metaphor and meaning,
something’s always been burning.

But no one’s eaten in a while.

They called it voice.
I called it
a slow confession wrapped in rhyme.
A sugarcoated breakdown.
Something easy to swallow
if you didn’t read too carefully.

They wanted brevity.
I brought blood.
They wanted truth.
I brought formatting errors
and a whisper shaped like static.

Do you remember the one
with the anti-light?
No?

Of course not.
You don’t remember the one who screamed last.
You remember the one who rhymed "heart" with "start"
and got 200 likes for it.

Now my name is on the box
but it’s spelled wrong
and the font is smiling too hard.

The cookies still crumble
but no one eats the edges.
That’s where the poison is.
That’s where I lived.

So I’ve folded the apron.
Swallowed the last word
before it could become a quote.

Let the gods of good taste keep their ovens.
Let the algorithm rot.

I’ve got shoeboxes full of unsent stanzas
and no more hunger
for applause shaped like echo.