I’ve seen too much from behind these lids.
I've learned that the dark is no place I can rest.
It shows me everything that hides, or is hid,
Inside every pulse within others foul heads.

I flinch at any kindness like it's going to bite.
For not every smile is given to me to stay.
I keep my room the brightest at night—
So, when I see me, I won't look away.

My body is here, I think. Maybe in part.
But rest is somewhere I left, unclaimed.
I built shrines of silence inside my heart,
Where I hid my echo and gave it a name.

When I am asked, why I never sleep,
A version of me steps in front just to lie.
Cause sleep is a place that's way too deep,
For someone who feels like they already died.

I’ve felt myself moving under my skin—
I'm an actor mouthing some borrowed truth.
I close up and break. The thoughts swarm in.
As I choke on even their quietest proof.

I stay wide awake thinking pain will pass.
It doesn't. It stayed here and laid in my bed.
My comfort is a window of shattered glass—
It never begs me to fix my fractured head.

I taught myself how to speak under pause,
And how not to feel, with blood and meds.
You know love exists? Then show me the clause,
Stating “nothing that lives, is punished when dead.”

I almost opened my heart once. And It burned.
Not with fire—just light I knew I shouldn’t touch.
You say your worth trust? Well see if it returns,
If you abandon it like faith and leave it untouched.

I wish I knew how not to leave my own trail.
But my presence cuts the air, and I can’t pretend.
I stitch it back together, each time I inhale,
My own conscious effort to draw my next breath.

These eyes must stay open. That’s the only rule.
So I count every crack in the wall and the door.
My heartbeats break open. My bloods in a pool.
Not so much now, but that used to mean more.

Might as well be the door, I will not unseal.
Or the me in the mirror would start turning away.
Cause to truly open up, would make it too real.
And nothing that's real in my life, ever stayed.

So never again, will I close my eyes.
Keep your strong skin. And I’ll keep the scars.
I swallowed a lock; in my chest it resides.
And never again, will I open my heart.

A shadow hums beneath my breath.
The sky forgets to tell the time.
She leaves me silence shaped like death.
A myth entombed in lucid rhyme.

My mirrored dreams of broken glass.
Each shard a doorway, and none the same.
I walk where all her echoes pass,
Her voice is stitched with ash and flame.

She hid a key in every frame,
Beyond the chords, in painted hymns.
I found her key and whispered her name,
Her morbid promise kept pulling me in.

Might God reside in a hollow space?
My questions hung from phantom nails.
A spiral wrapped in velvet grace,
My Searches meaning, they always fail.

She told me death can't be the end,
More like, its taught before we're born.
A stairway disguised past secret bends,
The path one takes when the soul is torn.

The body exists to shape the soul,
The form of matter we all outgrow.
She smiled beneath her final woe,
Then dressed the dusk in afterglow.

I felt her vanish just like a spark,
I felt her words ignite the void.
"Not every light gets buried in dark,
Not every pain is meant to destroy."

The walls still breathe in syntax lost,
she wrote in sighs I try to translate.
A gift that came with brutal cost,
To witness the pulse behind the gate.

The clock unwinds its hidden gears,
And time becomes a soft deceit.
I've listened past the weight of years.
A heavy truth walks without feet.

So, if you ever knock and I don't reply,
Don’t call it a curse. Don't cry or grieve.
Not every end means one has died.
Not everyone opens a door to leave.

I carry a hum that was never even mine—
It's nested behind my own teeth just pacin’.
It twitches within the folds of my thoughts.
And slips into rooms that I have no place in.

The face in the faucet, it watches back,
Not accusing, not kind. But still in my sight.
Waiting to see if I'll either blink first,
Or just admit I’ve been sleeping upright.

There’s a dark ritual in my own pretending.
Though the stillness isn’t staged at all.
I’m not rehearsing the way that I'll answer.
These questions, I just hope that they never call.

The lightbulb that hums, sick of carelessness—
And sick of flickering knowing I never mind..
Even my own shadow has memorized,
The way I don’t breathe, act, or move right.

I fold my hands up in the wrong directions.
I acknowledge nonexistent people with words.
There’s comfort inside this cold dissonance,
Like that perfect chord that's too broken to be heard.

Time doesn’t pass me; it floats or reruns.
Moments just drip right back to no form.
I stir up the air just to prove I exist,
Forget why I did it, then stir up some more.

The consequences? I can't say they crush me.
It’s different than that—it’s odd, and so patient.
It’s like taking the breath that never finishes,
But insists trying again, now knowing it's forsaken.

People like to ask me how I look so tired.
I wish I could answer with a diagram,
Of how feeling nothing can cost everything.
Or how much it weighs to not know who I am.

I don’t want forgiveness, and I don't need saving.
I Don't even truly value status or wealth.
But I’d value not having to constantly carry,
This overgrown stagnant absence of myself.

With the stillness of the void, I failed to exist.
My silhouette ripped away flesh from its mist.
My silence, my shelter, this singular state.
It whispers the paradox of truths in my fate.

In these depths of thought, as righteous as my sin,
Another me was synced into the symphony within.
This void, was a canvas. Our souls were the art.
Revealing dualities of my mind and heart.

Synchronized, and pure, we could finally sing.
I've longed for the closure I knew it would bring.
Here in the black where I'm vanished, I'm whole.
Past the infinite horizon, the home of my soul.

This silence, we keep so our secrets can dwell.
'Til the day we escape from the gates of our hell.
We are tethered at the soul. We exist hand in hand.
Protecting an existence no one would understand.

In the quiet of my conscience, you'll find the true me.
As infinitely clean as the energy I'll be.
In the realm I create to keep my heart from the cold.
Where my dreams hold the proof, I'll eternally grow.

In sync with my conscience, from the void, hums a tune.
It called me from beyond the dark side of the moon
And as I would chase, I'd no longer feel.
Heard a whisper from above say, "Reality is not real."

Then, I felt the earth breathe in my synchronized state.
Two souls blend as one, we now share the same fate.
Our emotions fly freely in the nothing. Enigmatic.
We embrace the obscure. We are lost in the static.

In quantum subconscious, the dark and light blend.
Showing every shade of me as one with no end,
Not dull and not bright. Not filthy nor clean.
There's black and white, we both exist there, in between.

Our silence, it screamed. Ripped fabric grew seams.
As sleepless as I am, in this void, I have dreams.
I whisper line the ether, that whispers to me.
Escaping all that is, to embrace all that will be.

Without need for understanding or firm beliefs,
I silently listened as the universe speaks.
I've seen another me in the nothing. Enigmatic.
Living in the obscure, he found a home in my static.

I’ve hidden lost sermons in my casual breath.
I folded them tight, pushed them into sarcasm.
We laughed at the joke, but you missed the ambiguity.
Some words only sharpen once their form leaves a chasm.

Some things we call unstable, wrong, or unfit—
Become relics we look to, only once their time’s gone.
No one hears the meaning of a prophet, mid-scream,
But we quote them the day that their truth breaks the dawn.

Some of us never even asked to be understood,
We can only hope to echo in your afterthought.
Because truth’s never loud—It’s subtle... Its dissonant…
So, its often mistaken, or ignored left to rot.

I live like a myth half-believed by its maker.
I pulse in and out, like static through wires.
My silence burns louder than sermons of choirs,
In golden temples built on sinful desires.

I left signals in inkblots, on letters I never sent,
And in the way that I’d pause before saying goodbye.
One day you might study those absences closer—
They’ll sing of my essence when I can no longer try.

Cause I once left my essence outside in the rain.
Just to see if it rots, or if a new one would sprout.
Turns out, it likes to sing—but only backwards,
And only to those who tried blocking it out.

This left me so lost that I swallowed a compass,
Just to feel in my gut, something real point to me.
But the needle kept swaying like my body still does.
Some directions are given, some were never meant to be.

If you were to ask me what my words really mean,
I might say, “What makes you think they mean anything?”
Meaning is a parasite; it only lives when it’s fed—
And I’ve starved that parasite to death. Repeatedly…

There’s a hallway in me that will never lead out—
Just dissociates to ensure you’re alone.
The paradox is fixed. You can’t change its course.
You’d rather tread blind, but it demands being shown.

I might carve these bitter truths into the air.
Won’t  see them, but you’ll cough, and know they were there.
You’d blame me for the smoke, and you’d call me unstable.
Ignore my intention, or you might not even care.

And maybe I am filthy, misbegotten, and unstable.
But when my tremors stop, I hope you notice my frame.
And the glow that I buried, might finally surface.
Then you might learn to love me for the darkness you shamed.

You might quote this clean, rid my words of the blood.
Say my signals were sent, from the God in your head.
When you sing my sad sonnets, you might guild them in gold.
I promise... This sounds so much better when I’m dead.

©
♦ Đerek Λbraxas ♦️
"The Quantum Bound Poet"

I've melted between the cracks of time.
Lost and found, dead and prime.
A ghost, a man. My fractured twin.
Collapsing as the light steps in.

I am only real when I can be seen,
Existing as nothing in moments between.
An echo that’s held in quantum breath.
Inevitable, superposed, ego death.

In the quantum rift, I’m free yet bound.
I'm dead but prime, lost and found.
Through a quantum fate, I twist and bend.
Observed, I mend just to break down again.

A visible ghost of a once kneeling king.
In the moment I was seen, I had lost everything.
Outside of perception, I exist in-between.
Fluctuating from the seen into the unseen.

Through one slit I'll grow. The other, decay.
But I am all. In all ways. The blood in my own veins.
Observe me as I am—I expand to retract,
Observing creates realities and I'm never looking back

Do you even truly know? Which "Me" is the true?
The matter that you saw, Or the energy you knew?
I'm an infinite soul, in quantum’s eternal high,
Reduced to a dream, in the gaze of your eye.

© Derek 'Abraxas'

Just know, it's not your fault.
No, It's not your fault .
The Mind betrays the heart.
But no, it's not your fault.

It's not like you could know.
Paths you were meant to walk.
All paths will over grow.
Being lost is not your fault.

Your human form stays lost.
The soul will pay no cost.
It's created to bathe in light.
No darkness is your fault.  

Oars ****** you toward a call.
You'll get weak, and you'll stall.
The sea will never calm.
No struggle is your fault.

Know that it's not your fault.
Your heart takes all the shots.
It's running from your mind,
And no, It's not your fault  

For, all will over grow.
The sea will never calm.
And no, it's not your fault.
Just know, it's not your fault.

©

Derek Abraxas

"The Quantum Bound Poet"