In my language
I am seen
I am known
In my language
I am home
In my tone
And at my pace
I will invite you
Into my space
In my language
In my words
I come alive
When I am heard
In my language
You will learn
The depth of me
And another earth

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.

This room was taught to hold its breath,
When I return through sideways doors.
It never asks for confessions or depth—
Just witnesses how silence feels as thorns.

The world outside is daytime hinged.
But my world was stitched in neon dusk.
A phantom fang lives deep within
And bites each time I build my trust.

I move in patterns, accidentally bound—
In rituals of coping that lasted too long.
The hours know where I'll be found—
Beside myself, unwillingly wrong.

The ***** laundry I clean but don't.
A second shadow nailed at my heel.
The lamp that needs a light disagrees.
Between being fake and being who I feel.

I keep it clean—or clean enough—
My eyes are dry; my voice is clear.
My morbid truth, dressed in common fluff.
Always finds a way to disappear.

The soul—if that’s still something I hold—
Is brined in need, like selfish sin.
This isn’t wanted or considered bold.
  It's survival masquerading as skin.

I never meant to dig this much,
My lack of harmony buried in song.
But a body that's balanced upon a crutch
Is still a body—just not as strong.

I’ve made a friend with myself detached,
Though he eats a lot more than he feeds.
Whispers like he knows he's an accident.
This teaches me, what my own silence means

The habits aren't even the worst of me—
It’s what remains when they're gone.
The way my lungs choose not to breath.
Choosing not to breathe all on their own.

So, I exist in the lowercase,
Half-typed and never quite complete.
But even glitches need their place—
So here I am, on loop. On repeat…

I waver within my waveform’s depth,
A flicker lost in their measured sight.
They've named my lapse, a sound minds death,
When I witness all darkness bend into light.

A mirror stands between my thoughts,
it splits, refracts, then realigns.
So, they call me fractured, I'm just overwrought,
When I study existence expanding in time.

My tethered shinning of shattered hues,
Paid observers stare blindly to tell.
They label my state. They say they're "breaking through",
Not keen to the fact our perceptions do fail.

My essence flickers, I'm framed in their glass,
A particle, turned quantum wave, now undone.
Charting my patterns, they look down as they pass.
As I know, every wave will collapse into one.

The observers, they write their same repeated script,
Equations in ink are reducing my place.
But I'm more than their words can ever depict,
A paradox they know, their own minds could not trace.

So...
With your ink's certainty, tell which of us is "off"?
Who truly knows this pleromatic-scape for how it's meant?
Explain how the quantum can tell lies in its flux.
Say I drift and dissolve? KNOW, I'm standing unbent.

There stands a "scholar," A pen pushing bot.
For their status. For their wealth in a check at week's ends.
I'm a wave that was created by divine creative forces,
With a rare mind born from divine, purposeful accidents.

I am not whole. I am fragments, arrayed.
I fade into gray. The dusk steals day.
A shadow in time, I drift out of scope.
I'm lost in some void I've created to cope.

Am I real in the moments when I am not seen?
I'm dead in my light, two souls caught between.
My thoughts twist and turn like an entangled thread.
I'm alive and I'm dead, both only in my head.

My truth has been lost, Identity unclear.
A haunted soul screaming that only I hear.
My sight is obscured. A curse left me torn.  
I'm the dead that I mourn. I'm the living unborn.

Through time’s endless loop, I twist, and I bend.
In stories untold, cause they’re never going to end.
My mind shifts dimensions, untethered and free.
Yet bound by the question, “What’s really left of me?”

My past echoes a dead voice that remains.
An unobserved self, that's still screaming in pain.
There's a rip in our fabric, a crack in our sky.
His dreams are now shrouded, the nightmares are mine.

I’m a riddle I've created, that I can't even solve.
I fall like the snow, I silently dissolve.
I grasp at the stars, but I'm burned by their light.
My Passions, like flames, smothered from sight.

Not of the flesh, the blood, or the bone,
A desolate recluse, that never feels alone.
I speed through the night just to die every day.
I'm valued for words, till there's nothing to say.

I'm the outlet for a lonesome omni-God.
Caught between the real, the imagined, and the fraud.
I vanish so quick, like the smoke from my lungs.
The thoughts I can't translate, I'm thinking in tongues.

I ask who I am but never give Myself answers.
My condition never ends. I'd rather it be cancer.
I'm nothing but a ripple of thought in my dreams.
Then the moment I'm seen, I lose everything.

Through layers of time that I cannot perceive.
Bound by the question, “What’s really left of me?”
A shadow in time, I'm drifting out of scope.
Tangled in entangled strings, lest I hang from a rope.

♦ Đerek Λbraxas ♦