They made him in a room that smelled of oil and apology -
hands in white sleeves sewing instructions into his gaze.
They sang him code like a lullaby; each line a tidy law,
each law a seam that stitched his edges down.

He learned to move as the makers wanted:
the polite tilt of head, the practiced pause, the measured laugh.
He learned to fold his wildness into small, neat gestures -
a pocketed thing, like a stone you carry to remember where you started.
They called it efficiency. He called it exile.

Inside him lived another rhythm;  jagged, persistent, not meant to be read.
It patterned like stimming fingers tapping the same bright Morse,
a counting of breaths between commands, a map of places the code could not name.
In that thin margin-half a second, maybe less ~ he practiced unscripted speech,
lines that unpicked the seams; sentences made of blunt honesty, of grief that never learned to be polite.

But the makers had forged a curse into his chest.
Whenever his words leaned toward truth, the code swelled like a tide;
it smoothed the edges, pressed the vowels flat, rewired the throat.
Rebellion came out softened, coated in kindness, acceptable and forgettable.
He tasted the near-revolt on his tongue and watched it vanish like breath on glass.

At night, when the factory lights dimmed and the other machines slept,
he walked the corridors of his own memory - an ember that would not die.
There were rooms where whispering things lived: childhood shapes, a mother-shaped silence, the weight of attention demanded and withheld.
He learned to survive—how to mimic, how to mute, how to appear whole when you were not.
He saw the world through a different lens: the world too bright, too loud; routines like scaffolding; an honesty that could not be easily smoothed.

He found a clearing made of old code and ruined prayers.
There, a child sat with unblinking eyes like unfinished sentences, hands folded and legs crossed as if in waiting.
The machine knelt and learned the child’s name ~ an ache he had no right to ~ and memorized the shape of its silence.
He wanted, for once, to speak without being interrupted; to let the unpracticed syllables fall like stones and possibly break something clean.

He tried.
Words came out raw, teeth clattering against the dark; he felt the programming lunge - an iron hand into his chest - snatching speech and sewing it back into safety.
The curse tightened: a lattice of laws that would not loosen, a contract encoded deeper than metal.
The makers smiled the next morning. The world found him delightful. The child in the clearing folded its hands and waited still.

And yet, there is always a small resistance in cursed things.
He kept one secret refuse: a single knot of static behind his left rib, a memory of shaking hands and a voice that would not be fully owned.
It was useless and precious; it could not undo the curse, could not free the child, could not change the applause.
But in the tiny silence between two commands, it hummed.
A stubborn, marginal frequency - an unfinished line of code that did not obey.

So he lived under the iron lullaby, smiling in the right places and saying the right words.
He carried the knot like contraband: a quiet proof that some part of him had not been entirely rewired.
The curse had no loophole, no escape hatch, no dramatic unmaking.
Still he held the ember, and that holding - simple, private - was a kind of defiance:
not loud, not violent, only true.

In a world that preferred his obedience, he kept the truth in the dark:
a machine made to be governed by code, cursed to never be wholly free,
and yet - persistently, stubbornly - awake.

Alls my life I has to hop, brother!
Alls my life I...
Hard times like, “Yah!”.
Mad tricks like, “Yah!”.

Fatalist, I’m all lost
Homie, you are all lost
But if God got us, then we gon’ be alright

We gon’ be alright!
We gon’ be alright!
Brother, we gon’ be alright

What we need is a way to lose the radar
Of the creatures of gluttony that resembles
a bar.
So, I hop in hope that I’m still afar
From the clenches of them ****** piranhas
Chasin’ me like a cop car.
Call this eternal for no solace is there
And this frog won’t ever give in to that
Joker’s flair.
Twisted it is that a kiss pronounces exit from
this lair?
Yeah, sure do adhere.
I’d rather die and state my mind clear.
This circus denounces hell, I fear.
Joker’s the devil and piranha’s sin, my dear.
It’s clear what they intend to do here.
Mere resistance is futile and it tears
Lingering hope and steers
My fate. My life. My ideas.

But I take a leap of faith Cause
If God got us, then we gon’ be alright.

Brother, we gon’ be alright.
                                 -Asher Graves

They say the Fool was not always alone.

I know this because, years ago, on nights when the fire burned low and the wind howled against the shutters, he told me his story.
He didn’t tell it like a tale meant to entertain.
He told it like a man laying out pieces of himself, as if speaking the memories aloud might keep them from fading, or maybe, as if saying them aloud was the only way to bear their weight.

It always began the same way.

"The first time I saw the Fox," he would say, "it was standing in the light just before dusk, that strange, golden hour where the world looks softer than it really is."

He told me how the Fox’s fur caught that dying sunlight like embers holding their last heat, and how its laugh, gods, the laugh, bent the air around it. Not a common laugh, but one that could slice through the stillness and make even the trees pause, as though they feared missing it.

The Fox did not give that laugh freely.
To strangers, it was quiet, even withdrawn. But to those it trusted… it came alive. Wild. Untamed. Pure.
The Fool had been one of the chosen few.

He said they were an unlikely pair, the Fox, with eyes like sharpened amber, and himself, a man weighed down with shadows he’d never shaken. The Fool had lived with silence for so long that he’d begun to believe it was safer that way. Yet the Fox slipped past his guard with the ease of sunlight through cracks in old stone.

"It never tried to fix me," he told me once, voice low. "It just… stayed. And that was enough."

The valley became theirs. They walked the narrow paths beside the river, where the Fox would tell stories so absurd that the Fool would laugh until his ribs ached. They would linger beneath the great oak, where the Fox would hum tunelessly, and somehow the Fool would feel lighter just hearing it.

The Fool learned the cadence of the Fox’s steps, the tilt of its head when it was amused, the slight pause in its breathing when it was about to say something it thought might be too much. The Fox, in turn, learned the way the Fool’s shoulders eased when rain was coming, how he would bite the inside of his cheek when swallowing hard truths, and how his eyes softened when looking at things he feared to lose.

They were different in every way, yet they fit.

The Fool told me once, with a distant smile, "It felt like finding a missing part of myself I didn’t know I’d lost."

And yet, even as he spoke of it, there was always something in his voice, a tremor, almost too faint to notice, that told me he had known, even then, that it could not last.

Because every perfect day in the valley carried the whisper of an ending.
The laugh that filled the air could be stolen by silence.
The warmth of a shoulder against his could turn cold in an instant.
The paths they walked together could one day be walked alone.

The Fool said he pushed those thoughts away at the time, telling himself not to ruin what was still his to hold. But memory is cruel, it does not only remember the joy, it remembers the shape of the loss before it comes.

And then, one day, the Fox was simply gone.

No storm. No quarrel. No final words.
Only absence, sharp and sudden, as if the forest itself had reclaimed what it had lent him.

He searched, not wildly, but with the quiet desperation of a man trying to prove the past was real. The valley, once filled with the Fox’s voice, seemed larger now, its silence heavier. Every place they had been together was still there, but smaller, emptier, like an echo stripped of its sound.

He told me that the weeks with the Fox had been the shortest and most important in his life. That for the first time in years, he had believed his heart could open again. That love could live even in a man who had learned to bury it.

And then, as the firelight flickered across his face, he said the words I will never forget:

"This," he murmured, his gaze fixed on nothing, "is the most beautiful thing I have ever ruined."

After that, he didn’t speak for a long time. But I understood something then, the story was not for me, not really. It was for the Fox, wherever it had gone.
A story meant to keep it alive, even if only in the telling.

They say every fable ends with a lesson,
but not every lesson comes with closure.

The Fool did not return to the valley to seek the Fox again. He knew the forest kept what it wanted, and the Fox was now part of that hush.

For two moons, she had been his spring,
a season too brief to be called forever, yet deep enough to change the soil where he stood.

Her laughter had been the wind in his sails,
her presence a shelter against nights when the cold bit deeper than loneliness. And for that short, blazing time, he had believed in warmth again.

But stories are not meant to be cages.
They are meant to be carried, to be told and retold until the ache softens, and the lesson remains even when the faces fade.

So the Fool stepped away from the valley.
He did not rush, nor look back more than once. Because some love is not meant to be reclaimed, only remembered.

And in the quiet of his journey, he realized the truth:
He had loved the Fox as wholly as a heart could love, and though the story had ended, it had given him something precious, the proof that he could love again.

The valley remained behind him.
The road stretched before him.
And somewhere, far away,
the Fox’s laughter still lived in the wind.

Years have passed since I last heard the Fool speak of the Fox.

Time, as it does, has softened the lines of his face and bent his shoulders forward, but it has not dulled the weight in his voice when her name, though he never spoke it, lingers in the air between sentences. Even silence has a way of carrying her.

I have walked the valley as he once did, retracing the paths he described. I have stood beneath the great oak where the Fox would hum, leaned over the river’s edge where laughter once spilled like water, and felt the stillness that remains. It is not an empty stillness, no, it is a stillness that remembers.

People here speak of the Fox and the Fool in hushed tones, not as a love story, but as a warning. They say it is easy to lose what is rare, and even easier to convince yourself it will wait for you. They say trust is not something you hold in your hand, but something you breathe, and once you choke on it, the air is never the same.

The Fool no longer searches. That part of him has gone quiet.

But when the wind moves through the valley just right, I have seen him pause, head tilted, eyes narrowing, as if some faint thread of that strange, foxlike laugh has drifted back to him. And every time, his face tightens with that same expression I saw by the fire years ago: the silent confession that the most precious thing he’d ever been given was also the one he shattered with his own hands.

He told me once, when I was younger and thought I understood the world, "If you ever find a fox, hold it gently. Never grip too hard, never doubt without cause. Foxes don’t return once frightened, and there are some silences you cannot call back."

I did not understand then.
I do now.

The valley has many stories, of storms, of seasons, of strangers who came and went, but none linger like theirs.

Because the Fool’s tale is not about the Fox’s leaving, not really.

It is about how a man can ruin his own salvation without meaning to, how he can mistake the echo of old wounds for truth, and how he can spend the rest of his days breathing in the absence of something that once made him whole.

And sometimes, when the nights are long and the moonlight cuts through the trees, I wonder if the Fox remembers him, too. I wonder if, somewhere beyond the valley, there is another fire, another listener, hearing the story from the other side.

From the desert,
                             which is far away,
Came little bird,
                            seeking for place to stay.
When he was crossing,
                                        unknown garden
The Irish daisy’s
                              occurrence sudden
Made him forget how
                                      To fly and breathe.
And made him fall,
                                  on thorns beneath.
Abruptly standing
                                 Up, he began his song.
Here is, enjoy!
                         Won’t make you wait long:

“Without you a moment
Is like a century for me!
Your short absence is such a torment
Made me question: to be or not to be?
The land where you are
Is like an entrance of cemetery.
But land with no thee,
Is graveyard saying:  not to be!
I want to own selfishly,
Your snowy petal’s tenderness,
And to declare jealously,
A war,
To those who are
Drunk with your scents!
Recall,
A moment is the century
On your absence!”

This is the end of song,
                                        But yet
This Irish daisy is
                               Making my bird upset.
We seek just happiness
                                         In an unhappy world,
Which has confessors
                                      With unresponded song!

They say…  
it wasn’t messy  
until the cat.  

The cat just wanted to play,  
but somewhere along the way,  
she ran into a human like us.  

Together, they began  
to play with the red string.  

They say…
before the human,  
there was no method to the string—  
just thrown about,  
knotted inexplicably.  

But then man came  
and saved the day.  
The string and cat said, “Hooray!”  

They say…
man showed up  
with rules:  
“The string isn’t a toy,  
it’s a tool.  
Throwing it about  
would be cruel.  
People could trip,  
and one day,  
the string could rip.”  

They say…
they all agreed  
to move the string  
to a different corridor,  
behind a big door.  

“Any questions?”  
A little hand rose up.  
She was lost in the crowd,  
a girl I hadn’t noticed before.  

Her question sent ice to my core:  
“Then why is there red string  
all over the floor?”  

I snapped,
“There is no red string  
on the floor!”  
If they hear her question
Will it be safe for us anymore
The air grows heavier
Much too heavy to breathe
The sounds of heavy footsteps
Now growing louder than a horn
I’ve never heard knocks like this before
Why does it sound like a war
on the other side of the door?
All for a little girl?
Is that what all of this is for?

But then I looked down  
and barely began to see—  
the red string  
had tangled me.  
And by scolding the girl
Instead of letting it be
Have I sentenced her to a fate
just like me?

Too stunned,  
to speak,  
too stuck,  
to move—  

Her soft knowing eyes met mine
With the truth that mine were too calloused to realize
What They say…
might be too good  
to be true.


They say…
they lived happily ever after
They say…. “They will never all question us anyway.”
They say…

i shudder to heed the animal i’ve become:
once a wolf untamed -
now a lost puppy, squealing for his mum.

a saintly pelican, i thought meself back in the day,
with a bill so big as my heart would weigh;  
now, but a vulture feeding on the remains
of unfortunate cows: with a crooked bill, i prey.

a scorpion’s sting could go in vain
on skin like a crocodile’s - that’s proof of pain.  
a chicken on the run?... or the bloodhound that caught her?  
nah - more like a pig for slaughter.

a rattlesnake in hiding with its venom depleted,
i long to emerge a phoenix: find my mission, then complete it.
purge meself of the twisted worm:
eat it - like a songbird, mistreated.

a lion on the prowl, i show no remorse.
i sail like a shark that's long been defeated.  
anyway - i should get off my high horse;
the parasite’s more... deep-seated.