Arrived as a shadow,
a breath in waiting rooms,
voices flickering like moths.

No gods stitched footprints,
prayers dissolved like ink in rain.

Paper thickened,
names erased.

Then, a hand—
a lantern through the dusk.

Pulled from refusal,
names spoken,
ribs stitched with letters.

No temple, no prophecy—
just a voice breaking machinery,
until gears cracked beneath it.

In the hum of verdicts,
a voice that did not break.

Lemon-flavored poppy-seeded pearls crunch
Between the iridescent glint of my smile
As river beds are littered with glittering
Scales of a tumbling rich white sneeth.
Snollywaggs petter through the trempint forest
Hanging off of each piece of foliage
Are glossy globs of translucent orange marmalade
Going mitter mitter by the Trillow tree
Is the hollow ringing of an intrinsic song

Produced by the withering of an Old God
Laughter trickles into the billowing air as humble giants
Hunt for peace about the cherry orchard grove as
Woven mittens craft themselves onto wriggling fingers, poking in and out
Of unintentional holes found among its wearer’s
***** memories that seep out of the cracks
Flowing with a sticky flag stripped with dreams
Lingering in the shadows and meshing through

The confetti-covered walls. Hushing the clorgals
Raining down through the forest’s tangles
Is a weary process’s manifestation into a string of lights.
Black holes **** in another wonder
Towards the Nymph’s saddened stories
Whispered as a second century passes
Across the timpited marks along their skin
And into their mind that flies
Only to start the journey home again for the first time.

Yellow bleeds into empty space,
Fingers trace what’s forgotten—
Light bends, but doesn’t reach,
No warmth, no trace.

The wind erases what it touches,
Thoughts drift, lost in air.
Inside, a silence stretches,
Where words once lived.

A river fades,
But whispers crash—
Water turns to dust,
Silent in my chest.

A name, a face—
They slip like smoke,
Dissolving into nothing
I cannot grasp.

In the vinyl, I see Saturn’s rings.
I see them scattered with snowballs, glowing in the oh-so-distant sunlight—
peacefully floating in their orbits,
occasionally saying hello to one another
with a little bump from time to time.

The music blends as the snowballs form;
bigger, greater snowballs that—
once having consumed all around them—
stay frozen in the pitch-dark nothing…
They remain, mute and humble—observing.
And they never melt away.

I snap back—

—back to the vinyl.
How beautiful it sounds.
Not a single scratch really hurts your ear;
it rather tingles the senses.
The scratch of the needle turns the etches into flowers.
Each note is a cloud, and I am floating on one,
drinking the melody deep into my body,
letting it melt me away into water.
I rain down into my chair, and—

—I snap back.

My body tickles as the speaker shakes the air around me.
It liquefies, turns upside down.
The violin is playing…
Oh no.

I forgot about this part.

I see the mirror in your room,
and in the mirror, I see you.
And next to you, I see me.
I am still inside the drop.
And I know that in a minute, it will burst.
It will run down your cheek.
Any moment now.

I snap back.

I snap.

the bone-ache of wind and cold
runs up her legs as she walks through the plain
so she could rest in the earth and finally
sleep, knowing she found
something better than it was
before.

she searched the jungles once
but all she found were choking vines
still, the leaves whispered
𝘱𝘴𝘴𝘵, 𝘱𝘴𝘴𝘵, 𝘱𝘴𝘴𝘵
but the tip of their tongues faded
into static and she thought she found
a parchment’s glass bottle washed
up onto the shore but then the sea
leapt up and stole it again.

she sat on the beach for hours
like a long-lost lover, yearning and
waiting
but one day she vanished—
not to home, there was never
home, but to a place that replaced
her new loss with the ones she’d
met before, old friends with the other half
of the story.

now, she walks with the others’
manifest destinies but hers is a
glory that they’ll never know,
no gold or God or greatness but
an answer…
brushstrokes to give definition
though the edges always bleed,
so she reincarnates to do it all
again.

patiently, i wait -
my legs crossed,
and my heart too.
much time has passed
since the inevitable happened,
and yet, the light of a clement morn
never fails to justify the agony
of dying stars in the night sky;
or the ones too dead for even the
darkness that consumed them.
the heavens dispatch their
messenger birds to nook the
forebodings into the branches
of trees whose roots have shrewd
under the weight of logs that
outline their ascent.
such trees call upon the sages
to enlighten them,
and to warn them -
for they know too well how the
message might confound in the grips
of those who practise hedonism.
perhaps, the light has always been
too blinding for mortal eyes.

the flowers bloom all the same;
the winds usher the fragrant truth -
slowly, but surely;
and i lie in hope for the
rancid thoughts to inevitably
take on new meanings…

patiently.

perilous forests
lay bare: sheer, dark, and sincere;
so many secrets.

Drowned out by divas
It was comfort that left us unprepared for this
This being the circuital embibement of chores and books
A choice to unentangle the moth from the web
Leaves one with typical but still misunderstood disturbances
Dad is a peadophile
We had ***
And now they're naming me a newt
A wet creature, suited especially to specific environments
A sham executed from the musical tenemants is one thing
But a crammed into trailer park is just a shame.
what makes a butterfly float, when everyone else is drowning?
The eyeish eckelecktic rom capacity can be blown away
And the attitudes of specs can thwart their own terrain
But if a pen draws blood, there's not room left for anything
So tell me the joke, esplanade yourself beyond my reach
Coke yourself up, give a scream, patent this work as your own, cherish the tub thumping
Be a cherub though rather than an angel, excrete malignantly and door slam the foreign light.
But someone must decide if the light is foreign.