In the cathedral of my chest, the bellows wheeze and strain, each breath a prayer through glass— transparent, brittle, breaking.


The vapors rise like incense from the altar of my need, silver ghosts that dance between my ribs, between the spaces where my lungs once sang their steady hymn.
Now they collapse inward, twin flowers closing at the first frost of dawn, petals folding, folding until only stems remain— hollow reeds that whistle with the wind of wanting.


My eyes become black mirrors, pupils swallowing light like twin suns going supernova, expanding past their borders until the iris drowns in its own reflection. I see everything and nothing, the world a kaleidoscope of fractured possibilities.


Sleep becomes a foreign country whose language I've forgotten, whose borders I can't cross. The night stretches like taffy, sticky and endless, while my mind runs marathons through mazes made of memory.


In the chemistry of surrender, I am both the experiment and the element being tested— volatile, reactive, changing states from solid to liquid to gas, dispersing into particles too small to hold, too light to land.


The vapors know my name in languages I've never learned, whisper promises in compounds I can't pronounce but understand in the deep grammar of the body, in the syntax of suffering that needs no translation.


Here, in this laboratory of longing, I am the beaker and the flame, the reaction and the residue, dissolving into something both more and less than what I was before the first breath let the ghosts inside