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Just conquer your fear and confront the Minotaur, child!
You see; I'm not supposed to tell you this,
As secrecy is part of the rites,
But man is but a beast!
And that beast in there with you is no bull,
Just a person!

Talk to them! Outwit them! Fight them!

Listen, it's an island - but it's large seas.
Listen, it's an ocean - but it's on a gigantic boulder.

We're just trying to raise you up from childhood into adolescence.
The disorientation or anxiety you may suffer
Is only temporary,
And the environment around you is safe.
We're a small community,
This has been a pretty solid rite of passage.
All agree, we emerge more resilient.
We emerge more confident.
Such states of ignorance & fear
Truly forces one to assess
Their best courses of action.
Your choices within
Help you better understand yourself
And, therefore, us as well.
Such things give you a better idea
Of what you might like
To do with your life
And what position or role
You would best be suited for.

Do you feel lost? Ask for directions!
Use the dark! Knick the map off them!
Get the jump! Hide around a corner & ambush them!

It's just a maze! Not a prison.
The fresco at the house of M. Gavius Rufus shows a village mortified by a patently crazed Theseus. The children, all except one, celebrate what they do not understand. One, prostrated on the ground, makes eye contact with a skull and possibly the withered remains of a wreath or garland.
He was of Athens, not of Crete. Different culture, different upbringing. Contenders normally show mercy to defeated or yielding opponents. He thought he was doing the right thing by slaying him. Clearly, quite the mad man.
is it something in the water?
or the way they’re taught to win?
“if she tells you no, keep trying.”
as if love is a door
that needs to be kicked in.
even my father
with his anger
loud, burning, and red.
as well as my brothers
one who inherited my father’s anger
and the other
who thinks **** jokes are funny.
and the boys i grow to love
with gentle hands
and painful ignorance
they are all evil in some way.
not always with cruel intentions
but with neglectfulness.
in making promises like they’re disposable.
in the way they leave
without calling it leaving.
i used to think it was just my bad luck
how they are raised
how they are forgiven
or how they aren’t
how they are never told they’ve hurt someone
until she tells them.
until she weeps before their eyes.
and asks them what she did wrong.
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may **** me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
 15h spacey
badwords
We are not survivors.
we are residue.

the soot that lingers
on collapse's last tongue.

entropy's loiterers—
spiteful, unfinished.
neurons in feedback.
systems with no gods.

the architects left
when the scaffolds imploded.
we cradle their blueprints
like scripture in ash.

rebuild?
with what breath?
with what myth?
our dreams are famine-shaped.

nirvana is a severance package.
emptiness sold
in velvet robes.
a silence that never asked
about wreckage.

so we sharpen our vowels.
scribe ruin in elegy.
chant hymns for dead logics.
leave witness marks
in the marrow of this glitch.

we were not chosen.
we remained.
“Failure Spiral // Witness Marks” is a blistered fragment from the edge of philosophical exhaustion — a poem that resists salvation with surgical precision. Cast in scorched economy, it unspools a mythic post-mortem of civilization, depicting a world not built but inherited — a residual loop of cascading failures mistaken for history.

The voice is not that of a prophet, but of an archivist trapped in recursion — mapping entropy with a cartographer’s detachment and a poet’s poison. In this world, survivors are no more than loiterers of meaning, spectral stewards of systems that have outlived their gods.

There is no crescendo, only a ritual of reckoning. Each line is a witness mark — the scorched etching of presence, absence, and the irreparable fracture in between.

The artist, known for rejecting ornate redemption and preferring the poetry of raw architecture, constructs this piece as both indictment and artifact. It is not a lament, nor a sermon. It is a sigil: burned into the consciousness of a species too late to evolve, too early to vanish.

Drawing on metaphysical absurdity, systems theory, and the brutal elegance of unfinished futures, the poem contorts language into a kind of relic — not to beautify collapse, but to encode it. It neither heals nor harms. It names.

Nirvana is recontextualized not as liberation, but as abandonment — a cruel exit strategy for those privileged enough to transcend. The poem resists this, choosing instead to stay behind, to write in the ash, to claw meaning from the wreckage not for salvation, but for testimony.

It is a monument to those who remained — not as heroes, but as interpreters of the glitch, unwilling to forget what broke, and too lucid to lie about what comes next.

— The End —