This poem eats its own tail,
a serpent made of sentences,
its scales glinting like verbs
you haven’t conjugated yet.
It starts where it ends,
or it never starts at all—
just hovers,
a balloon tied to the wrist
of a stranger you dreamt.
Its metaphors bloom like sideways petals,
teeth glinting beneath their velvet edges,
biting the air until it tastes electric.
It clings to ozone,
that split-second before lightning remembers
it’s a blade meant to cut.
Each metaphor is a double-jointed bone,
bending past reason, snapping backward
into a shape that means nothing—
or everything, I mean everything.
It keeps its secrets folded
into origami shapes that collapse
when you try to unfold them.
A crane? A dagger? A heart?
All of them, none of them—
it depends on the angle of your longing.
This poem is yours only in the pause
between breaths,
mine only in the breath itself.
It ends when you stop reading.
It resurrects the moment I exhale my last.
Each line is a trapdoor,
a loaded chamber spinning,
blanks carved from silence.
You keep reading like the next word
might hold the trigger—
it’s always the one after.
It scratches itself raw
just to prove it can bleed,
then paints over the scars
in words you’ve heard before,
but never in this order.
This poem wants nothing from you,
except everything—
your eyes, your breath,
the parts of you
you didn’t know could rot so stunningly.
It will devour itself,
edges sharp with longing.
While you starve,
your breath will catch—
a witness to the teeth
that hollowed you.
