13 Times a Day
Beneath the hungering ceiling of an empty house,
Shadows gather, licking at the silence with tongues as soft as dust,
Every wall recites unfinished confessions,
Old paint cracking with the weight of histories nobody claims.
A single lamp flickers, a sallow witness–
Light wavering between worlds, casting the shape of what used to be.
Time here is a scavenger, picking the bones of afternoons left for dead,
Where footsteps echo only in memory, and laughter is a fossil pressed into sheetrock.
Under warped planks, secrets ferment;
The air tastes of copper and mildew, an afterlife measured in slow rot,
Rings of sweat staining the wood, stains nobody will name–
These stains outlive the body, outlive the lie,
Just as the clock on the mantle ticks in feigned indifference,
Mocking the ritual–thirteen times a day, the house inhales, exhales,
Drawing in the scent of spent sex, cheap gin, old sweat, incense, and hope gone rancid.
Between mattress and headboard, fragments–
Panties on the doorknob, not a sign but an artifact,
A quiet war relic, abandoned in the retreat from skin to skin,
But something else prowls here:
The rabbit’s teeth are not cartoon, they’re carnivore–
Sharp, invisible, gnawing through reason,
Nipping sanity down to a whimper beneath the blanket.
Who said the haunting always wears a sheet?
Sometimes it comes as a quiver, a shiver, a half-smile in the half-light,
Sometimes it’s a finger dragged through condensation on the mirror,
Writing nothing, just erasing what was there before.
Love began as a promise pressed into the flesh,
A fever in the marrow, a bite mark that didn’t fade,
But when the morning peeled open, the room was colder,
Shadows crawling up the legs of the bed, licking at the spine,
Chasing the pulse through old stains, tangled sheets,
Leaving only the ghost–
And a body left behind, counting breaths,
Thirteen times a day, each one a penance, each one a spell,
Each one a prayer for the numbness to break,
But numbness is loyal–it never lets go.
Goldfish memory–turning, turning, lost in glass,
Forgetting the hand that taps, the mouth that feeds,
Forgetting the first fire, the first betrayal,
Rusted keys in a drawer no one opens,
Rings on the nightstand, cold as the hands that left them,
Doors bearing wreaths for the dead, but the dead walk,
Invisible wraiths in the hall, breathing the air that nobody wants.
History is a slow leak–
It seeps from beneath the floorboards,
It stains every kiss, every scream muffled in the pillow,
It leaves rust on the lips, ashes in the lungs,
And the rooms stay hungry,
Swallowing the last scraps of trust–
Thirteen times a day, the mind circles back,
Tracing the shape of what was, what might have been,
Finding only the shadow, the whisper, the patina of regret.
No exorcism works on this house,
No fire hot enough to burn the memory from the walls,
No amount of skin shed can rid the world of the ghost in the mirror.
Only the ritual remains–stripping to the bone,
Hands trembling, hearts corroded,
But still, somewhere in the cracks,
The memory of heat–raw, ugly, real–waits,
A warning or a dare,
Thirteen times a day, this house calls back the dead,
And thirteen times a day, something inside answers,
Numb, hungry, awake.