150 Ways To Lose Your Mind

3 Piece Lunacy

Morning polish on my teeth,
my skin pulled tight around a hollow mannequin grin
that fits this tailored suit too well.
Cards on the table, cards in my pocket,
little white tombstones stacked with names
I want to watch go still.

Every compliment sticks to my face like tape
while my mind rearranges furniture, bodies, plastic,
and a very quiet drill.
I nod through the boardroom chatter
while an inner voice paces in circles,
tapping on my skull,
whispering who I should kill.

They only see the haircut, not the hammer in my head.
They hear my harmless laughter, not the marching of their dead.

I smile for the body count no one else can see.
Every joke they crack just sharpens something restless inside me.
I walk through crowds like a wolf in a rented human skin,
shaking hands, taking notes,
plotting how and where and when it all caves in.

Restaurant candles flicker on her lips
while my thoughts draw chalk lines under her chair.
She talks about charity, galleries, love,
I picture soundproof walls
and a polished axe resting by the bedroom door.
My hand brushes hers, she thinks romance,
I think pressure on a throat
and red mist that only lives inside my private lore.

They toast to bright futures while I hum along off key.
Inside I see their endings,
and it feels like home to me.

Late night stereo up too loud,
plastic on the floor in my imagination,
rain on the window like a metronome of dread.
I dance with ghosts that wear their business suits,
humming along to pop songs
while I picture every swing inside my head.
In the bathroom mirror my reflection flickers,
one side saint in Armani, one side devil in blood red.

Fuck you
Fuck off
Fucking hell I gotta go I gotta go,

“I have to return some videotapes”

Maybe I am nothing but teeth, hair, and hunger
with a credit card and a plan.
Maybe every heartbeat is a countdown
written in marker on the back of my hand.
If the mask hits the floor and the real one stays,
no one walks out of this clean.
All that shine, all that charm,
all that murder washing through a human machine.

Perfect suit, perfect tie, perfect lunatic within.
Shaking hands, taking notes,
waiting for the night I finally let him win.

“This confession has meant nothing”

Alone in the Crowd

In the crush of bodies, I find no peace,
every brush against me burns,
begging for release.
Elbows land like warnings I can’t deflect,
each drop of sweat another snare
I didn’t expect.

I shrink smaller with each passing face,
pressed in tight where my heart
can’t find its place.
The noise hammers like a fist of dread,
every pulse a stampede
pounding through my head.

Trapped in a sea of faces, I stand alone,
mapping the exits in zones I’ve never known.
Speaking in tremors, drowned beneath the roar,
lost in the crowd
where isolation cuts me to the core.

I chart each room before I walk inside,
trace every path my racing mind can find.
Every doorway marked, each escape rehearsed,
bracing for the swarm,
always fearing the worst.

I mutter to myself, a quiet battle cry,
build my shell from nothing
while the world floods by.
Alone, untouched, compressed inside the throng,
standing in the middle of a place
I don’t belong.

Anchor in Your Arms

Under the flicker of fading lights at night,
I search for proof in your sighs,
in every moan taking flight.
If I can pull you close,
make your world spin in my sway,
maybe then you’ll really see me
and decide to stay.

It’s not just want that brings me to your door after dark,
it’s the need to feel real,
to land somewhere and leave a mark.
Each gasp you let go is proof I exist,
a living thread,
tangled in these sheets
with reasons not to leave unsaid.

If I make you come,
I’m not just a name you’ll forget.
Every sound you spill
puts out another cigarette.
I’m bound to the moment you whisper that I’m yours,
in the aftershock between us,
I find my shores.

I drift through a life where feelings shift like tides,
without your skin on mine,
everything inside me hides.
But in your heat, pressed against each heartbeat,
I find a trace of something close to quiet
in the wreckage of this place.

Don’t let me drift away,
keep me locked in your hold.
Is it love or desperation?
The lines dissolve in the dark,
but every time you touch me,
you leave a permanent mark.

If making you feel good is what keeps me whole,
I’ll wear that purpose like a second skin.
Among the broken and the desperate,
in your want I find my role,
in the act of giving pleasure,
I anchor what I stole.

Ants on the Ceiling

Last night the ceiling crawled with ants,
a shifting black parade,
and screams locked in the fridge
hummed through the light it made.
My hands shake like leaves ripped loose
before a storm,
eyes twitching out signals
in shapes they can’t reform.

Sweat-soaked sheets,
drowning in a sea that won’t go still,
each night smears into day,
up trades places with downhill.
My name slipped out the window
with the early haze,
trapped in corridors
that loop through endless grays.

I’m fading out,
losing everything I’ve known.
The walls keep whispering
in a tone that’s overgrown.
Reality’s a thread too thin for me to grasp,
locked in withdrawal’s grip,
every breath a gasp.

Days or dreams? The line’s too blurred to tell,
caught in my own private version
of a burning hell.
Each tick of the clock hits
like a fist against my chest,
a test of what’s left standing,
a prayer dressed up as rest.

Forgot who I was once,
might forget it all again,
memories blowing past
like leaves caught in the wind.

Backseat Ghosts

Another ride, another cage,
the leather reeks of dread.
He pulled over once
and now it’s permanent in my head.
The rearview is a warning,
every glance holds a threat,
riding through the wreckage
of a thing I can’t forget.

Friends laugh and talk,
blind to the hurricane inside.
I smile and nod
but I’m buried in a ride I can’t abide.
Every turn, every stop sign,
a replay of that day,
when the whole world shrank to a spot
where I couldn’t get away.

No matter who’s driving,
I’m always transported back
to that moment, that place,
the snap of a closing trap.
Even laughter feels like chains
that drag me to that scene,
where I lost more than peace
in the backseat.

It always feels like walls
about to close in tight,
each passenger unknowing
as my panic grips and bites.
In this rolling prison,
I count off every mile,
searching for an exit
in each manufactured smile.

In the backseat,
shadows play across the corners of my eyes,
where the past and present bleed
and something in me dies.
I’m a ghost riding through my own life
in the place I dread the most,
trapped in the backseat,
sitting with my own familiar ghost.

Ballad of the Broken Mirror

She keeps a mirror under her bed,
wrapped in a sheet where the silver bled.
Too many faces, none of them hers,
too many voices that land like slurs.

She stares at the cracks, counts them like days,
each one a reason her smile decays.
The left side laughs, the right side cries,
and somewhere inside, another self dies.

She whispers names that don’t belong,
one for each place she pretended strong.
They shimmer, distort, all twisted and thin,
reflections of girls she couldn’t keep in.

Broken mirror, tell me true,
is any part of this really you?
Or just the pieces no one sees,
trapped in glass and memories?

She kissed her hands, made prayers in dust,
built an altar from rust and mistrust.
Her mother called her a porcelain child–
now she’s jagged and sweetly reviled.

They all said she’d shine when she grew,
but glass only cuts when it’s snapped in two.
Now she hums to her fractured face,
and keeps her truth in a shadowed place.

She sleeps with glass beneath her skin,
a thousand versions locked within.
And when she smiles, it’s razor-thin–
the mirror knows where she’s been.

Ballad of the Empty Chair

There’s an empty chair in the corner still,
it creaks like it’s waiting, quiet and ill.
No one’s sat there since the thunder night,
when she screamed in colors
that swallowed the light.

They took her shoes but not her name,
left behind the air and blame.
The dust still settles like it knows
she’s gone–but not too far to show.

I swear sometimes I see her shift,
the shadow leans, the curtain lifts.
And someone hums that crooked tune,
the one she sang to quiet the room.

Empty chair, don’t stare like that–
like you’re holding her laugh
in your splintered back.
I hear the ghost in the floorboards swear
that nothing leaves the empty chair.

They locked her file, changed her chart,
but you can’t discharge a shattered heart.
I still bring her tea at six-oh-three,
and pour a second cup for me.

Sometimes the cup moves when I don’t blink,
sometimes the lightbulb winks in sync.
And I wonder if she’s sitting near–
that shadow love in the empty chair.

I won’t forget, I won’t repair,
I’ll just wait with the empty chair.
When they ask, I say I’m fine–
but we both know
she still sits sometimes.

Between Heaven and Here

Underneath the burning gaze of the midday sun,
it whispers secrets, old tales spun.
In the hum of light,
a language known to none,
I walk the line between the lost and the won.

Clouds scroll like scripture across the sky,
I decode their shapes as they drift on by.
Every breeze a message, every shadow a sign,
bridging dirt and heaven in this mind of mine.

I’m the oracle of daylight,
reading rays like runes,
hearing hymns in the heatwaves,
talking to monsoons.
Maybe I’m the chosen,
or maybe just profoundly lost,
bound in a holy moment,
no matter what it costs.

Visions arrive with the dawn,
retreat at dusk’s approach.
In the loneliness of sunlight,
I find my silent coach.
In the plainest moments,
in the clear and the still,
I feel the pulse of something
bending to my will.

Whispers of forever
in the warmth across my face,
I stand alone,
caught between time and space.
Is this madness or a revelation so divine?
Bound to the heavens,
yet the dirt is still mine.

If the sun speaks, I will listen with care,
for in its burning voice,
I find something rare.
Between the whispers of heaven
and the murmurs of the ground,
I wander through a cosmos,
praying to be found.

Between the Pages

I am the secret keeper,
tucked in her dirtiest reads,
where her breath catches,
where her hungry heart feeds.
Pressed in the folds
where fantasies run wild,
witness to the moments
she comes undone and smiled.

She pulls me close, then sets me aside,
lost in the rush where her wants collide.
I’m the silent observer
at the peak of her pleasure,
the bookmark resting
where she hides her treasure.
Curling at the corners
from each desperate grip,
each stain a record
of her abandoned script.

I live where her fingers linger,
pause, and play,
in the dead of night,
in the crack of day.
Between the pages of a filthy tale,
I am the witness to her breath.
Left on the pillow
where her dreams unfurl,
in the quiet aftermath
of a pleasure-wrecked world.

Chapter fifteen, a climax so raw,
I’m the keeper of the heat,
the match and the straw.
Crumpled and cherished,
I wear every mark
of her journey through desire,
a blazing arc.

So here I rest in the silent afterglow,
a simple bookmark
with stories I’ll never show.
Tangled in the saga
of her deepest night,
a quiet witness
to her private delight.

Birthday Party for the Dead Girl in the Wall

They hung her name on a pink balloon,
said she turned eight again this afternoon.
The candles hissed when the cake was lit,
and the wallpaper peeled
where her shadow sits.

We sang off-key as the lightbulbs popped,
and the clown from the east wing finally stopped.
The dolls in the cupboard clapped on time,
and the party favors bled in rhyme.

It’s the birthday party
for the dead girl in the wall,
where she giggles through the drywall
and answers when you call.
She likes her cake with screams on top,
and blows out the lights before we stop.

Her gift this year was a brand-new name,
wrapped in ribbons and constant shame.
She unwrapped it slow with ghost-white grace,
then wore it wrong on her paper face.

The music box crooned her favorite tune,
while the walls moaned soft
like a haunted room.
And when she asked to play outside,
the vent blew cold and the candles died.

They say she never lived at all,
but her drawings pulse behind the hall.
Crayons bite and mirrors smear,
and her giggle means she’s very near.

Now every year on this cursed date,
the ward sings low and seals the gate.
We eat the cake, but not too deep–
or she’ll climb back out
from where she sleeps.

Bound to Breathe

In the mirror’s gaze, a truth unfolds,
worn like armor, these wraps of old.
Tighter, tighter, the fabric winds,
hiding the wars waged within my mind.
The breath I catch, sharp and brief,
underneath, a stolen sense of peace,
a flat horizon on my chest,
in this reflection, I’m my best.

Shadows whisper, harsh and cruel,
but I fight back with my own rules.
Bruised but breathing, marks I’ve earned,
each day survived is a lesson burned.
Through pain and pressure, I’ve found my grace,
a hard-won smile on my own face.
This binding brings me closer to
the truest version, the honest hue.

Bound to breathe, bound to fight,
cloth that tightens feels so right.
This chest now flat, I stand revealed,
in wraps of courage, I am sealed.
Breathing easy, breathing free,
in this bind, I find the real me.

They say it’s just a phase, a passing shade,
but in these wraps, my fears all fade.
Not trapped but freed at last,
every breath unchained from the past.

So I’ll wrap up tight until the dawn,
in these bands, I am reborn.
Not hidden, but uncovered,
in this fight, I am discovered.

Break These Chains

Caught in a maze of my own making,
walls built high,
foundation shaking.
Every step, I’m closer to the flames,
calling out to break these chains.

Echoes bounce off these hollow halls,
my voice a whisper whenever it calls.
Through the cracks, my spirit strains,
lost and pleading
to break these chains.

In the silence, hear my cries,
underneath these heavy skies.
Hope wears thin, despair remains,
begging you
to break these chains.

Breathless Trust

Inside, my organs revolt,
a silent scream,
lungs lock up in a cold
and suffocating dream.
Gut wrenched tight, knotted with fear,
metallic taste
when the panic draws near.

My heart skips, a beat misplaced,
in the rhythm of a race it never chased.
They say breathe,
but the air feels thin,
trapped in a cycle I can’t win.

Jaw clenched tight, vision starts to burst,
stars in my eyes, a blinding outburst.
Every pulse throbs with dread,
echoes of a broken clock inside my head.

Can’t trust the very air I breathe,
each inhale cuts like something underneath.
This chaos, internal,
strangling what might have been.

Tell me to breathe,
to find some peace,
but my trust in breath
has long since ceased.
In this storm that won’t release,
I’m lost, breathless,
begging for decrease.

Candy for the Psych Ward King

He sits on a throne made of pillbox lids,
wearing socks on his hands like holy writs.
A gown that drags through jelly-stained tiles,
and a golden crown
of tongue depressor smiles.

He rules from Room Thirteen-and-a-Half,
with a wand made from a broken graph.
His scepter leaks syrup
when the moonlight bends,
and he speaks in riddles that never end.

Candy for the Psych Ward King–
bow down, kiss the ring.
Feed him sugar, don’t ask why,
he’ll trade your thoughts for a lullaby.

He calls roll call with a xylophone bone,
humming show tunes on a dial-tone phone.
Says he once dated a ghost named Sue,
but she left him for a bottle of glue.

He knighted a mop and married a chair,
drew smiley faces on his underwear.
The nurses curtsey, the meds bow low,
as he licks his throne and steals the show.

He’s got a cape made of caution tape,
whispers secrets to a paper grape.
He says, “Reality’s a plastic spoon–
stir it wrong and you taste the moon.”

They tried to medicate his highness down,
but he painted smiles on every frown.
Now he rules the west wing with flair,
and the fire alarms all braid his hair.

Candy for the Psych Ward King–
let the gurneys dance and the IVs swing.
There’s no escape, no pills, no sting–
just cotton-candy chaos in everything.

Cathedral of Contrasts

My mind, a cathedral
caught in a hurricane’s rage,
vaulted highs that scrape the stars,
an impossible height.
Galaxies hum in the veins
of my manic delight,
a universe cracked open
in the thrill of the flight.

But as the tempest turns,
so too does my fate,
from euphoria’s pinnacle
to a hollowed-out state.

Under the rubble of my soaring spires,
the silence I begged for
now chokes and mires.
The crash shakes through the broken stone,
in the aftermath,
I find myself alone.
Mania’s fire leaves embers that sear,
the ash a reminder
of everything I fear.

In my cathedral’s rise and fall,
I dance on the edge of a manic thrall.
The highs are a hymn, a powerful swell,
the lows a requiem,
a descent into hell.
Between these walls,
I lose and find my way,
a pilgrim in the cycle of night and day.

Mania burns with a brilliant flare,
lighting up dreams pulled from thin air.
But the beauty of fire is a temporary light,
and in its dying glow,
I brace for the night.

Here in the wreckage of storms passed by,
I gather the pieces where my hopes lie.
Building again as the cycle renews,
in the cathedral of contrasts,
I pick my bruise.

Come Over Im Not Okay And Im Out Of Clean Spoons
Come Over I Am Not Okay And I Am Out Of Clean Spoons

I type with one thumb, screen too bright for the pressure behind my eyes,
dishes stacked like a barricade,
the sink a skyline I pretend I cannot read.
I write and delete three versions before I send the only one that fits:
come over, I am not okay and I am out of clean spoons,
that is all of it, that is me.
The floor is a graveyard of clothes I could not carry to the basket.
The trash swells.
My brain has been humming the same flat note since three in the morning.
I am not dying.
I am only stuck in that glue where brushing my teeth
feels like scaling a wet wall with no ledge, no warning.

You show up without asking for details.
Hoodie over pajamas, shoes untied, hair unstraightened,
tapping on the door like it might shatter.
You are holding grocery store sushi, cheap cookies, two bottled drinks,
and you say I did not know what you needed so I brought choices for the ache.
You take one look at the room—
the chaos, the smell of takeout, the half-finished tasks staring like open mouths—
and you grin and say alright, you get the couch, I get the chair,
tonight we are doing the bare minimum and calling it a win.

You do not tell me to try harder.
You do not suggest a walk, or a shower, or three things I am grateful for.
You just sit down, kick off your shoes,
put your feet under my leg,
and say fuck, today hit hard, huh
with that soft brow of yours.
You treat my empty tank like weather.
Not a moral failure.
Not a reason to pull back and leave me in it.

Come over, I am not okay and I am out of clean spoons,
that is the closest I get to please help, I am not fine.
You answer with keys in hand, snacks in a bag, jokes on your tongue,
no lecture, no checklist, just time.
You do not fix the broken parts.
You just keep me company in this cluttered room
while my head slowly resets from stagger to stand.
Come over, I am not okay and I am out of clean spoons,
and you still cross town for me with empty hands and open ones.

We eat straight from plastic trays,
sauce dripping, both of us staring at the muted screen
like either of us gives a shit about the plot.
I let myself rant about nothing and everything—
the message I did not answer,
the phone call I dodged,
the way my own heartbeat sometimes feels like a gunshot.
You do not jump in with wisdom.
You just nod, and throw in that is bullshit or yeah, I hate that too
every few minutes.
Every little curse from you lands like a blanket
over the parts of me that feel like bad news.

At some point you stand up, stretch, wander into the kitchen.
You run hot water without asking.
You wash exactly four plates, three forks, two cups.
You hum off-key, not judging, not tasking.
You come back smelling like dish soap and steam,
flop down again,
and we both know that tiny dent in the chaos
is doing more than any grand gesture could.
You are showing me how heavy it is to move at all on days like this,
and how much it matters that you moved anyway.

One day I will be the one driving over, mid-meltdown on your side of town,
arms full of junk food and clean mugs
and the patience you taught me.
I will kick your trash can with my heel,
mutter this place is a disaster
with a smile and mean every bit of kindness in that thought.
Until then, when my energy disappears like loose change
in a couch cushion I never find,
I will thank every tired star
that you read that short dumb text
as the red flare from my mind.

Come over, I am not okay and I am out of clean spoons
is not poetry.
It is just the truth when I hit the floor.
You treat it like an address, not a burden.
You punch it straight into your inner guide and head for the door.
You sit with me through the white noise,
through the scrolling,
through the silence,
through the nothing that weighs more
than any crisis I can speak of.
And that quiet presence—
your presence—
drags my pulse back toward shore.

Confetti Out Of Fuckups

We make confetti out of fuckups
throw that shit into the sun
let the wind take all our bad calls
all our weird stumbles
every half-finished run

If the neighbors see us dancing
in our ruins
let them shake their heads and stare

I used to keep a secret graveyard
in my head
where every wrong move
every late reply
every drunk text
lived like a ghost that would not quit

All the missed chances
bad haircuts
awkward laughs
the nights I cried in public
and pretended it was allergies
all stacked like shit

Then one day I hit the same old wall
so hard I slid down laughing
thinking if my life
is going to keep exploding
in slow motion like this

I might as well sweep up
all the sharp little pieces
throw them in the air
and call it a goddamn
glitter-bomb kiss

Every breakup that ended
with “you’re too much”
every job I lost
for not smiling
in the right shade of beige

Every project I started
at three in the morning
high on hope and caffeine
then abandoned halfway
through the page

I stitched them into banners
hung them in my mental ceiling
like trophies from a war
I was losing to the floor

If I tripped that many times
and still walked here
maybe falling on my face
is how I learn
what I’m here for

They told me “clean it up
straighten out
make your failures small and neat”

But I was born with marching band heat
in my chest
and a need to drag my mess
out onto the street

There’s the time I quit too soon
the time I stayed too long
the party where I sang off-key heartbreak
into a stranger’s beer

The day I snapped at someone I loved
came back shaking
with apologies and ugly tears

The tattoo that did not age well
the haircut that made me look
like a villain in a low-budget flick

All those moments used to haunt me
now they’re part of the fireworks
when the plot gets thick

If you never screw it up
never take the chance
that leaves you red and raw and wrong
you might stay neat and tidy
but you’ll never know the taste
of a misstep turning into a better song

Bring your “should have known better”
bring your “I can’t believe I said that out loud”
bring your chilly little moments
that still wake you up sweating
too ashamed to tell the crowd

We will tear them into strips
and toss them high
till they’re just bright paper in the sky

Then laugh so hard
the old shame cracks
and falls away
like paint that finally peeled dry

If the story falls apart again
we’ll rip the pages
throw them too

Confetti made from every wrong step
still looks beautiful
on you

Cosmic Rites

In the dim twilight, my body stirs, awake,
hands trace ancient paths,
a sacred quake.
Underneath the open sky,
my body laid bare,
whispered hymns merge
with the cold night air.

I fuck with the fury of colliding stars,
each motion a rite,
breaking every bar.
Orbiting ecstasy,
I’m lost in the divine,
murmuring to the heavens
in every spine-arching line.

Skin to sky, I’m a conduit of fire,
every climax a chant, an unholy choir.
In the grip of passion,
I see the divine face,
in the pulse of release,
I find a sacred space.

Touch turns to power,
every breath a creed.
In the rapture of night,
I plant the seed.
Eyes closed, I reach beyond the veil,
in the garden of stars,
I fiercely sail.

As dawn creeps, my ritual wanes,
the universe whispers,
remembers my claims.
In the quiet aftermath,
I’m softly bound
to the echoes of the pleasures I found.

Cracks and Whispers

With every step, a silent prayer,
avoid the fractures in the road out there.
Each crack a marker, a sin recounted,
in asphalt scriptures,
my faults mounted.

A path rerouted, an obsession’s dance,
evading numbers
that darken my trance.
If my foot falls on a broken stone,
a spit to cleanse the fault I own.
Whispered names of those I’ve pained,
echoing softly down memory’s lane.

Every crack is a sin,
every clear path a grace,
tracing life’s lines
like a fragile vase.
I tread lightly,
lest the ground I curse,
in every step, a chapter, a verse.
I’m the keeper of my own flawed gait,
turning sidewalks
into a confessional slate.

Beneath my feet, the city’s scars,
aligning my steps with distant stars.
A cosmos underfoot, in concrete laid,
with every careful dodge,
a penance paid.

So I’ll walk this city’s winding veins,
a mapmaker of sidewalks,
charting pains.
With each step, a story unfolds,
in the quiet of my mind,
where confession holds.

Crawling Touch

In the quiet shadows of my room,
I unleash a secret swarm,
tiny creatures crawl and loom,
on my flesh they form a storm.
Antennae graze, legs hold tight,
each movement sharp and precise,
on the edge of disgust and need,
I find this living vice.

Creeping sensations, skin my canvas,
they dance in whispered trails,
each touch a taboo, my craving madness,
in their tiny legs, my grail.
They scurry under, over, within,
tracing paths only they know,
this communion, skin to chitin,
where repulsion and arousal grow.

Infest me, tiny wanderers,
with your primal crawl,
make me shiver, make me tremble,
make me surrender all.
Alive with every tiny footfall,
disgust tangled with desire,
it’s a dark, forbidden ritual,
this insect-kindled fire.

I close my eyes,
feel the weight of each tiny passing guest,
in their chaos,
my inhibitions rest.
What’s feared by many
brings ecstasy in the crawl that others dread,
in the frenzy of their tiny steps,
I find my hunger fed.

So let them crawl,
let them claim my body their shifting land.
In their small grip,
I find a flame too fierce to understand.
It’s primal, it’s profound,
on my skin, their tiny dances,
in the world of the small and strange,
I find my darkest trances.

Divine Altar

Beneath her body,
I take my sacred place,
face pressed to the altar
where I worship her grace.
Every breath a prayer,
every touch a chant,
in the folds of her warmth,
I find the fervor I want.

She rides the waves
of her own pleasure above,
while I’m lost in the service,
the labor of love.
Ignored, unseen,
but feeling every shift,
her scent surrounds me–
my soul’s perfect gift.

Underneath her,
I’m where I need to be,
her taste, her warmth–
my sanctuary.
She clenches,
and I reach my peak,
in the silence of her pleasure,
no need to speak.

This is no passing desire,
it’s a devout faith,
in the shrine of her skin,
I find my wraith.
She doesn’t need to thank me,
doesn’t need to know,
as long as I can linger
where her waters flow.

So leave me here forgotten,
under her reign,
where I worship every shadow,
cherish every pain.
Her scent is my doctrine,
her moan my creed,
in the temple of her body,
I’ve found all I need.

Duct Tape Wedding Dress

She made her veil from hospital sheets,
and dragged it through the bloodstained streets.
Her heels were wrapped in bandage bows,
and her bouquet hissed when it chose.

She carved her vows in lipstick red,
on a clipboard stolen from the dead.
She whispered “yes” to an empty chair,
then kissed a scalpel in the air.

In her duct tape wedding dress,
she danced alone and called it “blessed.”
Twirling in a shattered mess,
married to her own distress.

They threw rice laced with pills and shame,
and someone sang the bride’s full name.
But she just laughed and bit her tongue,
swore she’d be forever young.

She slow-danced with a morphine drip,
then took a bow and blew a kiss.
The groom was gone, or never real,
but the mirror clapped with pride and zeal.

She said, “I do,” to the voices inside,
broke the cake with a surgical slide.
And when they screamed, “It’s all pretend!”
she lit the aisle and smiled again.

Now every five years, on that day,
she walks the halls in disarray.
Still humming hymns in major stress,
in her duct tape wedding dress.

A stitched-up yes in a world of less.
She wed the storm, divorced the sane,
and kissed the sky through windowpane.

Earthbound

I knelt to scream,
the ground beneath whispered, exhaled,
its warmth seeped through,
calling me, a story unveiled.
Fingers clawing, digging deep,
the dirt spoke soft and sweet,
pressed my lips against the earth,
its pulse beneath my feet.

Swallowed soil,
each grain a memory,
each mouthful a call.
It tasted of beginnings
and the dusk of my downfall.
I fill my mouth
with the grit of the land that claims me back,
with every handful, deeper roots,
in the darkness, I unpack.

Mouth full of earth, I’m returning,
where the whispers bind.
The soil remembers my voice,
my tears, the pieces left behind.
I’m earthbound in my breakdown,
where the ground insists,
in the dirt, I find my quiet,
in the soil, I exist.

Can you hear the soil sigh
as I lay down to rest?
It covers me in whispers,
in this grave that knows me best.
I’m eating memories,
the dirt sharp against my teeth,
it’s a feral kind of freedom,
a relief that’s bittersweet.

Here I’ll stay,
beneath the whispering pines,
feeding on the earth,
erasing lines.
In the hold of the soil,
I find my peace,
as I break down,
I’m released.

Echo of My Existence

Mirrors lie, but the echo holds truth,
in the quiver of tones,
my proof of proof.
I narrate each step,
a whisper beneath breath,
for in the rhythm of speech,
I fend off the specter of death.
My reflection, a stranger,
a ghost in glass,
but in every word spoken,
I anchor my past.

Silence, a void too stark, too crude,
an unwelcome pit where fear is renewed.
When words falter,
the shadows stretch wide,
a world fading to black,
with nowhere to hide.
My voice, a lifeline,
through the void it must sweep,
for without its vibration,
I’m lost to the deep.

If I can’t speak, I disappear,
vanished in silence, consumed by fear.
My voice, the only trace of me
that feels real,
in its resonance, I heal, I feel.

Lost in a world
where sight can deceive,
it’s the sound of my soul
that I truly believe.
Doubt lingers
where reflections can’t find,
but in spoken words,
my identity’s defined.

So I’ll keep talking,
keep singing my song,
in my voice–my only truth, strong.
A proof of existence, a spoken hold,
in the melody of speech,
I find my place in the cold.

Echoes Below
Beneath the crawlspace where linoleum curls from rot,Murmurs twist like cigarette smoke, never caught.Night thickens in corners, too quiet, too cold,As ancient dread rustles the walls, brave and bold.No comfort in the humming of fridges or cars passing by,Every whisper is a question, a dare, a warning—why?Soft static in the carpet, a shadow that never leaves,Hints of laughter gone wrong, and hands wiped on dirty sleeves.
Not every voice belongs to the living, not every breath is earned,Some echo from the cracks in the floorboards, where innocence is burned.Rabbits? Or just madness, a trick of the house’s spine?Hard to tell, as the air thickens, sweet with the stink of time.Toys rattle under beds, attic stairs creak in shame,All the while, something small and clever is whispering your name.History gets rewritten by the softest of feet,Horror wears a plush disguise, the trap is always sweet.
No priest, no exorcist, no prayer at the door,Can banish the darkness that stains the corridor.It’s just a rumor, a stutter, a rumor’s decay—Yet no one sleeps easy when the bunnies come out to play.Every murmur grows teeth, every echo finds a host,And what crawls in the shadows is never just a ghost.Something’s always watching, always close, always low—Call it fear, call it legend, or just echoes below.

Echoes in the Halls

Step through these doors,
the air chills to the bone,
the smell of antiseptic,
on this fear, I’m overthrown.
White walls whisper tales,
echoes of despair,
ghosts in every corner,
floating through the sterile air.

In every corridor,
I hear the echoes call,
in the beep of machines,
in the shadowed hall.
Hospitals hold the endings,
stitched with silent cries,
where the bright lights flicker,
and a part of me just dies.

Hallways stretch like lifelines,
tangled in my mind,
every step an echo
of the fears I’ve left behind.
IVs drip like clockwork,
counting down the time,
in these halls of healing,
I find a steep decline.

Why do these rooms spin tales
of ending days?
Surrounded by recovery,
yet lost in a fearful haze.
Clean yet soiled,
healing yet it maims,
in these walls,
the air is thick with unnamed claims.

So I stand here frozen,
in these haunted flows,
a place of life and death,
where the quiet dread grows.
I’m suffocating in the white,
gripped by what I fear most,
for in this place of healing,
I’m just a fading ghost.

Echoes of a Stranger

Woke up on streets
that don’t know my steps,
dressed in a life that’s not mine,
I’m bereft.
Checking the pockets of a borrowed fate,
no clues, just questions,
and a date that’s too late.

A name flashes on a screen,
it’s not who I am,
I follow the echoes,
but they fade like a scam.
Walking through a life
where shadows replace faces,
each reflection a jigsaw,
missing pieces, empty spaces.

Here in the unknown,
I’m a ghost in my skin,
lost in the story
of who I could have been.
No past to anchor,
no future in sight,
just the present, unwrapped,
in the fading city light.

Every alley whispers
a piece of my tale,
the wind carries laughter,
a distant wail.
I chase the fragments,
hoping they’ll lead
to a moment of truth,
to the root of my need.

Is this freedom, or is it fear?
Unmoored, unmarked, untethered clear.
In the mirror,
a stranger meets my stare,
in the silence,
the truth begins to tear.

I’ll piece together this puzzle so wild,
from the shadows,
reclaim the life of a child.
Till I find my way back,
or forge a new dawn,
in the heart of the unknown,
I will carry on.

Echoes of Forever

In the whisper of twilight,
beneath the covered sky,
I found her gaze,
a familiar mystery to unwind.
Her laughter a melody,
played in lifetimes before,
in the dance of the ancients,
along the farthest shore.

I know her bones, her breath, her fight,
we’ve burned as stars lost in the night.
In her eyes, the worlds we’ve roamed,
she’s my echo, my past,
my mirrored home.

Every glance holds a story,
tales the cosmos spun,
of battles fought,
of kingdoms lost and won.
Her dreams whisper of me,
though she’s veiled in forget,
our souls stitched with threads
that fate has permanently set.

She walks through life
with a stardust trail,
haunted by a love that’s never frail.
A promise carved across time’s wide sea,
she’s the lost chord to my melody.

In the silence of her gaze,
the memories bleed through,
of lives we’ve shared,
of the old reborn as new.
No death can part,
no time can erase,
the love reborn
in each other’s face.

Echoes of Skid Row

Through the din of the city,
their whispers break through,
ghosts of the gutters,
their tales retold anew.
As I sit to eat,
they gather unseen,
voices of the vanished,
narrating the in-between.

They scream in the rustle
of the papers I discard,
a chorus of the damned,
life forever marred.
Coins laid on the sill,
offerings to appease,
by morning they’re gone,
stolen by a silent breeze.

The dead watch closely,
guardians of despair,
their eyes on the pennies,
floating in the air.
Each bite I swallow,
each crumb I dare waste,
a banquet for specters,
in haste, they punish in haste.

I’m the mouthpiece of the fallen,
the voice of the poor,
channeling the lost souls
from the skid row floor.
They haunt my actions,
make damn sure I remember
the scarcity of life’s last warmth
in the cold beyond repair.

Underneath the city’s glow,
where shadows sprawl and seethe,
the forgotten beg for memory
beneath the wreath.
I walk their path,
heavy with their weight,
in the grip of their whispers,
I fight their fate.

So here I stand,
a conduit to the past,
bearing witness to lives overcast.
Their voices guide me
through each lonely night,
in the echo of their suffering,
I find my light.

Echoes of the Battle

I walk through life with a soldier’s stance,
eyes wide, head high,
in a constant dance.
Fireworks crack like a sniper’s call,
I flinch, I falter,
but I never fall.

Walls at my back in every room,
restaurants feel like a tactical zoom.
Crowds are a field where shadows play,
I search for dangers that never stray.

Every pop, a cannon’s roar,
every night, a battle more.
In the silence of my mind,
the war replays,
I’m trapped behind.

Dreams are fields of fire and noise,
haunted by the ghosts
of my deployed boys.
Hands that grip a ghostly gun,
the war is over
but it’s never done.

In this hypervigilant ballet,
I dodge the shadows
that swing my way.
Peace is a fight I wage alone,
turning every stone,
the unseen known.

As the world sleeps tight tonight,
I stand guard in the fading light.
Memorizing exits, scanning faces,
finding war
in the quietest places.

Edge of Control

Locked in the rhythm,
a dance on the brink,
I play on the edge,
but I never let it sink.
Thighs tremble,
pulse races in the dark,
teasing the climax,
but I never hit the mark.

Each stroke a whisper,
every halt a scream,
balancing on the line
between the real and the dream.
I crave the pressure,
the unyielding hold,
in the space of near-release,
where I’m bold yet controlled.

I love the ache,
the relentless tease,
denial’s my drug,
brings me to my knees.
In this act of pleasure,
I’m both the slave and the king,
riding the wave,
but never letting it swing.

Breath short,
heart pounding with intent,
in the grip of a storm
only I can invent.
Pushing to the limit,
but I lock it all inside,
a master of moments,
in restraint I confide.

So I’ll edge and I’ll wait,
in this exquisite pain,
finding peace in the chaos,
in the loss there’s gain.
For the moment of denial,
where I’m desperately held,
is the throne upon which
my deepest urges are quelled.

Edge of the Abyss

In the shadows of my mind,
twisted thoughts begin to play,
memories crack like glass,
fragments swept away.
Each moment stretches,
warped by time,
a chilling silent scream,
living on this jagged edge,
where nightmares bleed into dreams.

No rest in the darkness,
where the mind refuses peace,
compulsions grip like chains,
and all the trembling never ceases.
At the precipice of madness,
where we hang by frayed threads,
we dance upon the razor’s edge,
among the living dead.

Feelings freeze in hollow chests,
the heart forgets to feel,
violent whispers haunt each breath,
too loud to keep them sealed.
Eroding self, a concept lost,
just shadows in the rain,
each reflection shows a stranger,
marred by invisible pain.

These aren’t tales of fiction,
spun from a quiet mind,
but echoes of existence,
cruelly and chaotically entwined.
Every second’s survival
against the undertow,
in the clinical pit,
where the darkest waters flow.

So hear this cry to the broken,
the lost, the ones who dwell
in the deepest pits of the mind,
in the corners of our hell.
For we are not your case studies,
nor your cold clinical files,
we are the living proof
of surviving trials.

Embers and Ash

With every strike, a spark ignites,
a tiny sun against the night.
Match heads blaze, a brief fierce light,
a pyro’s touch that feels just right.
Wax drips slow, a scalding kiss,
upon my skin, can’t resist this bliss,
in the heat, I find my truth,
in the flare of youth,
no need for proof.

I dream in fire, bold and bright,
burning the pages of my spite.
Books I loathed turn to smoke,
in the flame, I’m finally woke.
Cigarettes glow, a fleeting gem,
ashes fall like burning stems,
into leaves so parched and keen,
I walk away from the unseen.

Flames whisper to me,
a siren song so wild and free,
in the crackle and the heat,
I find a world that’s more complete.
An arsonist’s love, untamed and raw,
in every spark, a perfect flaw,
watching the world dance with fire,
in each pyre, my dark desire.

Every ember tells a tale,
of liberation, fierce and frail.
Through the smoke, I see the sky,
in the burn, I feel I’ll fly.

As the flames climb higher tonight,
in the fire, I find my light,
just a match and a dream to chase,
in the ashes, I leave my trace.

Emotional Overdrive

Love’s a potion,
sip it and I spin around.
I send a hundred texts,
watch the ticks resound.
Each ignored vibration
cuts a deeper slice,
in your silence,
my heart’s enticed.

I want to burrow
into the cave of your ribs,
live in the beats,
where no one else intrudes or fibs.
I don’t just date, I consume every part,
you’re the feast,
and I’m starving from the start.

Love makes me drunk,
so high, so low,
swinging from your words,
nowhere else to go.
In your eyes, a home,
in your absence, a void,
I’m spun by affection,
easily destroyed.

I trace your shadows on my wall at night,
rehearsing smiles,
preparing for the light.
But morning finds me cold, alone and bare,
each tick of silence–
unbearable despair.

I need to be your echo,
your heartbeat’s cling,
but I scare myself
with the neediness I bring.
This isn’t love,
it’s a hunger unexplained,
a need so raw,
a heart unrestrained.

If love is a drink, let mine overflow,
but teach me to sip,
not drown in its flow.
For in this intoxication,
I lose all I’ve known,
in the silence, in the chaos,
where my fears are grown.

Even Numbers

I’m counting out my pleasure
in a sequence, laid so bare,
odd numbers leave me hanging,
incomplete and in despair.
Every touch, a calculation,
symmetry must reign,
double down on ecstasy
to balance out the pain.

I moan like math,
in rhythms laid so precise,
seeking even endings
in the grip of my vice.
If I climax once,
the second must ensue,
can’t bear the thought of stopping
at a solitary view.

Edge of madness, teetering,
where numbers hold the key,
twice as sweet, the release
when it’s even, can’t you see?
A cycle of desire,
where satisfaction must align,
in the order of numbers,
where pleasure intertwines.

Tangled in the sheets,
where digits dance and twirl,
craving that completion
in a perfectly paired whirl.
My sighs are counted whispers,
echoed in the dark,
each gasp a step closer
to the even mark.

So here I lie in wait,
for the count to set me free,
in the grip of numbers,
where I find my symmetry.
In this bed, I’ve plotted
every line and curve so right,
making sure every ending
meets the even of the night.

Find My Mind

Scattered thoughts
like pages torn from a book,
windswept corners of the world
where I look.
Chasing whispers,
fragments I can’t align,
somewhere on this journey,
I hope to find my mind.

I danced with delusions
on streets paved with dreams,
fleeting glimpses of clarity,
or so it seems.
Every stranger’s glance,
a mirror to my plight,
reflections in the glass,
fading into night.

Find my mind,
in the tangles of the fray,
lost in the wreckage
of the everyday.
Search the shadows,
where the truths are intertwined,
help me piece together
the puzzles left behind.

Through the haze, a light,
a sliver of hope,
clinging to the frayed ends
of a rope.
In the echo of my steps,
I hear the call,
the missing pieces
waiting to fall.

In the quiet, a whisper,
the pieces start to click,
every moment, every memory,
thick and quick.
Building a map
from the fragments I reclaim,
a trail back to myself,
whispering my name.

Finding Sanity

Needle in a haystack,
searching for a fact.
Sanity’s slipping fast
in your twisted grasp.

Lost in the noise haze,
trying to find my way.
Words twist and turn
every step I take.

Mind’s a maze, no road.
Heart’s heavy like a load.
Truths melt and fade
in this endless charade.

Eyes dart, shadows dance,
caught in this cruel trance.
Lies become my home
in this mess right under the dome.

Breaking through the veil,
every whisper’s stale.
Can I find the light,
escape this endless night.

Trust is torn apart,
every side a dagger start.
Reaching in the dark
for the spark
lost in the arc.

Fingers of the Thief

In the shadows of the marketplace,
where whispers dress the air,
I’m the ghost slipping silently,
a specter of the dare.
Chapsticks, trinkets, earrings,
lost in the clutch of greed,
it’s not the shine of the taken–
it’s the rush that I need.

I exist in the grip,
in the silent cheer of theft,
in the heartbeat skip,
when I’m deft.
It’s the pulse of the forbidden,
where my secrets are kept,
in the drawers unopened,
where the quiet things slept.

Each item a victory,
each conquest a score,
small shiny proofs
that I am something more.
Not the value, not the cost,
but the thrill of the claim,
the world in my pocket,
unnamed.

And so I haunt the edges,
where morality thins,
finding freedom
in the weight of small sins.
Each object a whisper,
each steal a confess,
of a life too tangled
in the webs of excess.

So I’ll keep on taking,
keep on hiding my tracks,
in the thrill of the moment,
the act.
But behind each little victory,
behind each small escape,
is the shadow of longing
I can’t reshape.

Five Pills a Day Keeps Me This Way

I take the blue one when I wake,
to keep the dawn from feeling fake.
Then the white one right at noon,
to dull the ache that comes too soon.

The green one tastes like TV snow,
makes the world seem less of a show.
I wash it down with silent tea,
and wait for calm that mimics me.

By dusk it’s orange, warm and thick,
to mute the clocks that used to tick.
I don’t remember why I cried,
but something’s grieving deep inside.

Five pills a day keeps me this way–
not too sharp and not too gray.
Not too loud, not too clear,
just far enough to disappear.

The last one’s red, it slows my dreams,
and stains my sleep in quiet screams.
I lay like stone, I breathe like math,
drifting down a medicated path.

They say I’m better, I nod and smile,
but nothing’s moved in quite a while.
I feel no rage, I feel no thrill–
just the slow applause of another pill.

I don’t know who I was before,
but I know now I’m nothing more
than five small pills and soft decay.
And this is how they’ll keep me–
this way.

Fractured Hours

I count the seconds
slipping through my grasp,
each tick a mystery,
each tock a mask.
Find sketches in my room I didn’t sketch,
messages sent from fingers not mine yet.

In the mirror, who is this I see?
Shards of a life
I swear used to be me.
Lost in the folds
of time I didn’t spend,
wearing clothes to a party
I didn’t attend.

Hours dissolve like sugar in the rain,
echoes of me, a phantom’s sweet refrain.
I wake to find my world slightly askew,
trapped in a plot that I never knew.

Who pens the notes
in the margins of my days?
Who lives my life
when my mind strays away?
A stranger’s scent
on the jacket I wear,
a life fragmented,
a soul laid bare.

Tell me, who turns the page when I sleep?
Who whispers secrets that I keep?
In the echo of hours I never claim,
I live on the edge,
never quite the same.

Fraying Edges

Fraying edges of a worn-out soul,
tearing seams from a once-whole.
I’m unraveling, losing control,
in the fraying edges, find my role.

Stitch by stitch, the fabric tears,
each threadbare strand a tale of scares.
In the fraying edges, life compares
to a patchwork of unending snares.

If you find me here,
caught in the fray,
pull me out, lead the way.
From the fraying edges,
I dare not stray,
save me before I completely decay.

Gaps in the Dialogue

I start to speak, the room’s all ears,
but words slip slip through the cracks of my fears.
Mid-thought, mid-breath,
the lines just van vanish,
a script dissolved,
leaving me to languish.

Stut stutters steal the show,
unexpected actors,
my tongue ties itself
in unsought chapters.
I’m scrambling for the the the thread,
the plot I lost,
each pause a chasm,
each silence a cost.

In my head, it’s clear,
the script’s intact,
but on my lips,
it fragments, a broken pact.
I smile wide to mask the inner fright,
pretend I’m whole,
though nothing’s quite right.

Can can can you hear the halts,
the faltering tones?
Do you see the smile,
just a th-thin disguise,
for the panic that lurks
behind these eyes?

I gather the pea pee pieces,
try to forge again,
the lines I lost
in the eyes of them.
But the words don’t fit fit,
they’re out of place,
in the puzzle of speech,
I can’t keep pa pace.

So when the words fa fade,
know it’s not my cha cha choice,
my mind rebels,
stifles my voice.
In the silence between,
understand my pa plea,
see the struggle,
not just the vacancy.

Ghost Cradle

I walked past that crib,
felt the world pull down,
my body remembered a loss,
a gown never worn.
The room spun,
echoes of a life that never was,
my milk dried up
like rivers in the dust.

Those lullabies cut through,
sharper than glass,
each note a reminder
of what couldn’t last.
I fold these tiny clothes,
each fold a silent weep,
laid down in drawers
like flowers for the deep.

Every whisper of a child,
a phantom pain,
in the nursery,
where my heart’s refrain.
I cradle empty air,
the weight unbearable,
in this haunted room,
every joy, untenable.

I’ve tried to pack away
these relics of hope,
but they grip like the hands
of a drowning man’s rope.
The smell of unslept sheets,
the unrocked chair,
in the still of the night,
I find despair.

How I longed to hear the cry, the coos,
instead, this silence feeds my blues.
I touch the crib,
my hands tremble with grief,
in its bars, I find no relief.

So I’ll lock this door,
let cobwebs claim
this cradle of sorrow,
this bearer of bane.
Maybe one day I’ll return,
face what’s been stowed,
but tonight, it’s just me
and this lonely road.

Grayscale Days

Every meal’s just ashes on my tongue,
the world’s on mute,
every song unsung.
Touch is just a memory,
faded and worn,
I’m a silhouette in the twilight,
tattered and torn.

Sex is just a motion,
empty and cold,
laughter’s a language from stories old.
I’m wading through fog,
where colors erase,
trapped in the dull weight
of shadow’s hold.

Living in grayscale,
nothing feels right.
I’m lost in a world without appetite.
Watching the dust
as it dances in light,
hoping for color
to pierce through the night.

My bed’s a raft on a silent sea,
motionless waters of apathy.
Time slips by, unmarked by the sun,
I wait for a sign,
for something to come.

What’s the cure for a world
that’s turned gray?
How do you breathe
when air’s turned away?
I’m searching for sparks that might ignite,
a reason to feel,
to fight through the night.

I’m waiting still, as life drifts past,
for a moment of color to hold at last.
In the quiet, a whisper, a subtle plea,
for the grayscale to fade,
and let me be free.

Halo High

In the grip of passion,
I find my church,
beneath my hands,
salvation perches.
Each moan a hymn,
each gasp a prayer,
in the sanctity of sheets,
I strip souls bare.
Believing I’m anointed
to heal through bliss,
in every touch,
a sanctifying kiss.

The room glows,
halos hover in heated air,
sacred silhouettes
in the dimmed affair.
I see the divine
in the arch of a back,
in the crescendo of cries.
Holy am I,
in the temple of our skin,
delivering rapture,
absolving sin.

I’m the messiah of the midnight mass,
in our communion,
no one is outcast.
Feel holy in the hold,
in the rise and fall,
under halos,
we transcend, we enthrall.
Each climax a sermon,
each sigh a creed,
in the gospel of pleasure,
find what you need.

But is this delusion?
A mind’s fractured sight?
Or a touch of divinity in the night?
With every partner,
a congregation found,
in the liturgy of lust,
my faith is bound.

So I’ll keep preaching
where bodies entwine,
in each sacred encounter,
a sign divine.
Through the ecstasy,
my purpose is clear,
in the haven of passion,
we escape our fear.

Headlights Haunt

I see headlights stalking every shadow,
lurking in my wake.
Every mirror’s a gateway to that moment,
a never-ending ache.
The squeal of tires on wet concrete,
a soundtrack to my fears,
every drive a flashback,
steered through a lens of tears.

I dream in violent jolts,
metal twisting,
glass that shatters grace.
Awake in sweat,
the silent night can’t calm this racing pace.
The road’s a loop of what was lost,
of what might come to be,
each journey’s just a tightrope walked
between the then and me.

In the rearview,
past and present merge,
a line I can’t define.
Headlights haunt my every turn,
along these roads I’m confined.
I brace for impact with every shift,
in lanes where shadows play,
driving on,
but always looking back,
I can’t escape the fray.

Can’t shake the grip of that twisted steel,
the echo of that night.
Each headlight’s a reminder
of my never-ending fight.
They say time heals,
but mine just steers around the bends of pain,
with every mile,
I search for peace in lanes I can’t reclaim.

So I drive like I’m about to die,
with ghosts in every gear.
The road ahead is just a path
where headlights always leer.
No escape from what’s behind,
no speed can break this chain,
I’m riding with my memories
down a haunted lane.

Help Me, I’m Lost

I’m drifting on the edges of the night,
streets whisper secrets
in the cold, pale light.
Faces blur past,
they’re just shades of my fears,
chasing the echoes
that nobody hears.

Help me, I’m lost,
where the shadows play,
in the silence between
what I do and I say.
Throw me a line,
or a reason to stay,
caught in the drift
of my own disarray.

Laughter rings hollow
from the depths of the crowd,
covering scars
that the daylight’s disavowed.
I search for a sign,
something true to pursue,
but every path circles back,
missing you.

Under the spotlight,
my truths are undressed,
wearing the heartache
like a bulletproof vest.
Nights bleed into days,
with no end in sight,
dancing with memories
in the failing light.

Is this the madness
that they warned me about?
Laughing at ghosts
as my doubts scream and shout.
Here in the void
where the lost are like kings,
ruling over ruins
with tattered wings.

Her Handwriting
She leaves notes around the apartment sometimes —
not texts, actual notes on actual paper —
and I keep finding them in unexpected places:
tucked inside a book I was going to read next,
on the counter under my keys in the morning,
beside the coffee machine with no explanation required.
Her handwriting is specific, a little rushed,
the letters connected in a particular way I’d know anywhere.

[Chorus]
Her handwriting is one of the things I’d know anywhere —
in a stack of pages, in the dark, by feel —
the particular pressure she puts behind the pen,
the way the y’s go long and the t’s cross fast.
Her handwriting is the record of a person thinking —
the note in the margin of a book she’s reading,
the grocery list that’s secretly a love note
if you know how to read between the items.

The grocery list is its own language, actually.
She writes it how she thinks, not how the store is laid out —
produce next to canned goods, spices between the dairy —
and I used to try to reorganize it into aisles.
I stopped. The way she writes the grocery list
is the way she moves through the world in general —
her own internal logic, completely consistent,
a logic I’ve been learning to move alongside.

I’ve found notes from years ago sometimes —
in jacket pockets, in the back of notebooks —
and reading them is a different experience than getting them,
less immediate, more layered, more archaeological.
The distance between now and the note’s occasion
makes the handwriting visible in a different way —
I see it as an artifact of a specific day,
a record of what she was thinking on that particular afternoon.

[Chorus]
Her handwriting is one of the things I’d know anywhere —
in a stack of pages, in the dark, by feel —
the particular pressure she puts behind the pen,
the way the y’s go long and the t’s cross fast.
Her handwriting is the record of a person thinking —
the note in the margin of a book she’s reading,
the grocery list that’s secretly a love note
if you know how to read between the items.

There’s a note I’ve kept without telling her —
it’s from the bad year, the year I mentioned,
the year when keeping notes was not in her repertoire
because she was using everything she had for other things.
And she left one — just a short one, in the morning —
and I kept it because it was proof that she was still there,
proof that even in the bad year there was still this,
still her handwriting, still the note, still the trying.

I should probably tell her about the kept note.
She’d be surprised, and then she wouldn’t, and then she’d —
well, I know exactly what she’d do, and it’s good.
Maybe I’ll give it back as its own kind of note,
tuck it somewhere she’ll find it unexpectedly —
inside the book she’s going to read next,
beside the coffee machine one morning, no explanation required.
The handwriting she’s been leaving for me, finally returned.

[Chorus]
Her handwriting is one of the things I’d know anywhere —
in a stack of pages, in the dark, by feel —
the particular pressure she puts behind the pen,
the way the y’s go long and the t’s cross fast.
Her handwriting is the record of a person thinking —
the note in the margin of a book she’s reading,
the grocery list that’s secretly a love note
if you know how to read between the items.

I know the handwriting better than my own by now —
I’ve read it more attentively than my own —
and when I find a note I didn’t know was there
it still does the thing that the first one did.
Not the same thing, not that new-thing feeling —
something richer, something with the weight of years in it —
the thing that happens when what you love most
keeps showing up in the handwriting you’d know anywhere.

Hollow

Under my skin,
there’s a storm that’s swirling wild,
a stomach bloated with shadows,
a perception defiled.
Each reflection’s a sentence,
in mirrors I’m trapped,
my belly a burden
that’s endlessly mapped.

I dream of hollow,
an echo of peace,
where the contours of torment
find their release.
Wrapped tight in silence,
craving the void,
where the weight of emptiness
is fully deployed.

Through the fabric,
my fingers trace the lines I despise,
a contour that rebels,
swelling before my eyes.
I wrap tighter,
a breathless grip on my waist,
in the mirror,
a figure I long to erase.

I yearn for a chisel,
to sculpt away the fear,
each curve and edge
that I cannot bear.
A fantasy of flatness,
where nothing can hide,
no depth, no substance,
just space inside.

In the quietest corners of the night,
I confess,
a vision of vanishing,
a whisper of less.
No pulse, no pain,
beneath the skin’s small swell,
in the hollow of dreams,
where I long to dwell.

I Learned to Sit Still Because It Hurt Less That Way

They told me stillness was a virtue,
that calm was strength,
and silence truth.
But no one asked why I stopped moving,
why I froze instead of speaking youth.

I didn’t stop because I healed–
I stopped because movement revealed.
Every twitch invited questions
I couldn’t bear,
every breath too deep
turned into a stare.

So I learned to fold my hands just right,
to nod when spoken to,
soft and light.
To stare past windows,
never through,
to answer, “Fine,”
like it was true.

I learned to sit still
because it hurt less that way.
When I froze,
they stopped trying
to change what I’d say.
Stillness meant fewer notes,
fewer pills,
and a smile drawn neat
between the drills.
It wasn’t peace.
It was just the safest place I could stay.

I Left the Light On in Case She Comes Back

I leave the light on every night at eight,
the porch one, the one she said was too bright,
the one she squinted at when she came home late
and laughed and said I was wasting light.

But now the light is the only thing
that still does what I ask.
It doesn’t argue, doesn’t leave,
doesn’t wear a mask.
It just stays on,
burning through the dark for her,
waiting for a car
that doesn’t come anymore.

I changed the bulb twice since she left.
The first time because it blew.
The second time because the new one
was a different shade and she’d have noticed too.
She noticed everything–
the crooked welcome mat,
the spider on the mailbox,
the way I always wore that same old hat.

I left the light on
in case she comes back.
It’s the smallest act of faith
I have intact.
The house is dark
except for that one glow,
and if she drives past,
at least she’ll know.

At least she’ll know
the door’s not locked.
At least she’ll know
I haven’t stopped.

I Meant to Water the Plant
There’s a specific yellow that belongs to things left to their own devices—
I’ve watched it spread across the leaves in slow, unstoppable slices
of evidence about the gap between my thinking and my following through,
the pot on the counter accumulating its quiet indictment of the you
who passes it daily with the glass in hand and the thought in the mind
and somehow arrives at the couch without having taken the time
to close the six feet between the faucet and the waiting soil—
it’s six feet. I have done nothing. The plant is spoil.

I meant to water the plant. I had the glass. I had the route mapped clean.
I had the water in my hand and the plant in the space between
the faucet and the couch—I walked from one to the other
without stopping in the middle, which is either the mother
of all metaphors or just the particular physics of a man
who loses the thread between the thought and the action plan.

It’s not indifference—I want to be accurate about that.
I think about the plant with specificity and fact.
I think this fully, I commit to the thought and hold it clear,
and then the thought completes and exits and the television’s here
and the moment of the watering has passed its window for the day—
the plant is yellowing in increments. I meant to water it. I say.

This is the fourth week and the leaves
have crossed the border into the particular that grieves
out loud from the counter—the specific lean of the thing, the brown
at the outermost edges spreading slowly toward the mantle.
I meant to water the plant. I mean it now, which is also
what I meant last week. The glass is right there. The plateau
between the wanting-to and the doing remains the terrain
I can’t seem to cover. I meant to water the plant. Again.

I Remember Being Real

I remember being real once, I think–
before the pills flattened everything
into a smooth, unbroken surface
where nothing rises and nothing stinks.

There was a version of me who laughed too loud,
who threw things when the rage came down,
who cried at songs
and felt the weather in his bones
and stayed up late
just to hear the quiet of the town.

That version scared them.
So they fixed it.
Smoothed the edges,
filed the teeth,
rewired the circuits
till the whole machine ran underneath
a sedated hum that passes for okay.

I remember being real.
I remember days that hurt
and days that burned so bright
I couldn’t look away.
Now every day’s the same low-watt fluorescent gray.

I used to fight.
Now I comply.
I used to scream.
Now I just sigh.
I used to feel the full catastrophe of being alive–
now I observe it
from behind the glass
of a man who used to thrive.

I remember being real.
I’m not sure what I am now.
But somewhere in the quiet,
I still feel it–
the faintest pulse
of what they couldn’t medicate out.

I Told the Walls Too Much

It started with whispers
when I couldn’t sleep,
confessing to plaster
things too heavy to keep.
The ceiling heard everything–
every ugly admission,
every fear I dressed up
as a casual decision.

I told the walls about her,
about the night I didn’t stop it,
about the pills I counted
and the drawer I almost popped it.
I told them everything
because the walls don’t talk back,
don’t judge, don’t flinch,
don’t tighten or crack.

But now the walls know too much.
Now they breathe
with the weight of what I gave them,
and the air feels thick with grief.
I can hear the paint remembering
when the lights go out at ten,
and I swear the corners lean in
like they want to hear again.

I told the walls too much
and now I can’t move rooms.
Every inch of plaster
holds my personal tombs.
The landlord paints over,
but the words bleed through.
I told the walls too much,
and the walls
told them to you.

I Want To Make You Breakfast, Not Fix You

You walk into my place with that look that says brace for impact
hope it is just coffee, not a breakdown, not a fight
You start listing all the shit that went wrong this week
like I am your boss, your doctor, your judge
under this cheap kitchen light
You talk faster than the kettle boils
eyes on the floor

waiting for me to hit you with ten steps and a color coded plan
I crack eggs instead, slide bread in the toaster
say “sit your ass down, ” you are not a project
you are just a worn out human who ran.
You tell me your ex said you were needy
your parents said dramatic
your last therapist said “unpack that on your own time

” You half joke that anyone who stays more than three months earns a medal or a warning sign
I hand you a plate that is way too full
shove a mug into your shaking fingers
tell you this morning is off the clock for your crime
If you want advice I can give it
though I screw up daily, if you want quiet
we can just chew and let the silence climb.

I am not here to sand down every rough edge till you look good on a brochure
I am not your rehab arc, your makeover story
your proof that love is the cure, I like you tired
messy, half done
still figuring out why your hands shake when you feel insecure.

I want to make you breakfast, not fix you, pour coffee
not save your soul
You do not have to earn the scrambled eggs by playing a perfect role
Sit in my hoodie with your hair all wrecked and your eyes all shot and your voice off key
You are not my homework, you are my person
and feeding you is enough today for me.

You start to cry over toast, which feels stupid to you
you say sorry three times
like emotions are spills you should mop
I say fuck that, tears are salt, let them fall
let them drop
You tell me the worst stories between bites
the ones that still taste like metal when the spinning won’t stop

I do not make a speech or a promise I cannot keep
I just listen, refill your plate
and let the heavy stuff flop.
There is a difference between holding someone while they stitch themselves back and turning them into a craft on your shelf
I will not pin your pain up as some trophy
I will not treat your past as a reflection on my own polished self
You get to be a whole person here

not a fixer-upper I took on for my health.
I want to make you breakfast, not fix you, pour coffee
not save your soul
You do not have to earn the scrambled eggs by playing a perfect role
Sit in my hoodie with your hair all wrecked and your eyes all shot and your voice off key
You are not my homework, you are my person
and feeding you is enough today for me.

One day you might outgrow me
might move to a city with better transit and less mold and more sun
You might meet someone who knows how to budget and stretch and wakes up early and actually enjoys a run
I hope they make you breakfast too
not as a prize for staying clean or calm
just as a small warm start
I hope you never again sit at a table where you feel like a case study instead of a beating heart.

I want to make you breakfast, not fix you
hand you a fork and a safe place to fall apart
You are allowed to show up half built, half hopeful
full of weird cravings and an aching heart
We can talk about healing while the toast burns slightly and the eggs stick to the pan like your past to your mind
Or we can just eat in quiet, two wrecks sharing crumbs
and leave the bullshit behind.

If you ever forget your worth and start listing flaws before you knock on my door
Remember this kitchen, this table
this first cup of coffee
and know you do not need fixing to sit here once more.

I Was Never Cleared to Leave

The nurse smiled like she meant it
when she said, “You’re good to go,”
handed me a manila folder
with everything they think they know.
They packed my meds in a paper bag
and called me stable now,
but the wind hit different
when I crossed that final threshold somehow.

The sky looked wrong,
like it had moved just one degree,
and my name felt thin on my tongue,
not quite tied to me.
They said, “You’re ready,”
but my hands still shake when it rains,
and I still flinch when I hear my name
called in unfamiliar chains.

My discharge papers said “Improved”–
three times in blue,
but no one asked about the dream
where the hallway turns and chews.
No one checked my smile
when I said I’d be okay,
they just nodded, stamped the date,
and sent me on my way.

I was never cleared to leave–
just signed and waved along.
I passed the tests,
I played the part,
I didn’t hum the wrong song.
But there’s something still stitched to my spine,
something I can’t retrieve,
and no matter how far I run from it–
I know I was never cleared to leave.

I see the tiles even in my sleep,
white and humming low,
hear the voice from the west wing
whispering what it knows.
I walk free but not alone–
there’s a pulse that’s not quite mine,
trailing three steps behind me
in silence, every time.

I hear it breathing in my walls.
I see the hallway stretch in malls.
I taste the bleach in my coffee cup,
and no one looks when I freeze up.

Now I live in half-lit rooms
with doors that creak like guilt,
build pillow forts against the dreams
I left unbuilt.
And every morning when I wake,
I check my wrists and breathe–
just to prove again to no one
that I was never cleared to leave.

I Was the Favorite Until I Broke

They used to smile when they said my name,
held their clipboards high
like I’d won the prize.
“Making progress,” “bright-eyed,” “stable and strong”–
I was their favorite
until I proved them wrong.

I learned how to answer in balanced tones,
how to cry just right but never moan.
I gave them breakthroughs dressed in grace,
and tucked my panic behind my face.

They’d bring the new ones by my door,
say, “Look how far they’ve come, and more.”
But no one saw the cracks beneath,
the silent bleeding underneath.

I was the favorite until I broke,
until the laughter caught in my throat.
They marked me “hope” in black and red,
then sighed when I cracked instead.
They loved me most when I played the part–
but they looked away
when I lost my heart.

The compliments turned quiet fast,
replaced by silence built to last.
They spoke in code around my name,
and whispered numbers steeped in shame.

The nurse who used to sit and chat
now closes doors–won’t do that.
And the doctor nods, but never stays,
like favorites only count on good days.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t fight.
I just stopped shining quite so bright.
And in the quiet, I finally knew–
they only love what they can use.

So now I sit behind the glass,
and watch the new ones as they pass.
They look at me like I’m a goal–
not knowing
I’ve already lost control.

I Wasn’t Sick Until They Told Me I Was

I was fine until the clipboard came,
until they wrote my thoughts
in someone else’s name.
I was just a kid who heard too much,
who flinched at noise
and shrank from touch.

They measured me against a chart
I’d never seen,
said the way I think
falls somewhere in between.
Between what’s normal
and what’s not quite right,
between the daylight
and the hospital light.

I wasn’t sick until they told me I was,
wasn’t broken till they found a cause.
I was just a little strange,
a little loud,
a little lost
inside a quiet crowd.

They gave it letters,
gave it weight and shape,
a diagnosis I could never quite escape.
And once they named it,
once they wrote it down,
the thing they saw
was all they found.

Now I wear the label like a second skin,
wondering where the sickness stops
and I begin.
Did I make it real
by learning what to call it?
Or was it always there,
waiting for the audit?

In My Defense, I Was Left Unsupervised

They said I was stable.
They said I was calm.
They stopped counting
how long I stared at my palm.
I ate my food, I took the meds,
I didn’t scream when I saw red.

I told them what they wanted to hear,
even smiled when they walked too near.
I learned to mimic peace on cue–
but I was always the spark, not the fuse.

I sat in the chair, quiet and clean,
while my mind ran wild
through a silent scream.
They left me alone,
said, “She’s fine now, see?”
But the worst part of me
was finally free.

In my defense,
I was left unsupervised,
with needles, matches,
and too many lies.
You don’t lock a storm in a room
and expect a breeze–
you get fire in the vents
and ghosts in the knees.
They called it healing.
I called it bait.
And when I broke–
it was too fucking late.

The nurse with the smile
stopped showing her face,
the girl with the grin
took over the place.
I warned them soft.
I warned them slow.
They laughed it off
like a cartoon show.

But even cartoons bleed when you cut deep–
and even the quiet ones don’t always sleep.

There was no knock. No scream. No prayer.
Just a whisper that she’s not there.
And in the dark,
when the lights cut out–
that’s when I finally came undone.

So write me up. File me down.
Blame the dosage. Blame the town.
But don’t forget who lit the spark–
while they were staring at the dark.

In my defense,
I was left unsupervised,
with every locked door
just slightly disguised.
You call it madness.
I call it clear.
You should’ve stayed close–
you should’ve stayed near.
But now I run this fucking show–
and baby, I glow.

In the Quiet After

Lying here,
the world fades out of view,
your heartbeat a rhythm,
steady and true.
With you still in me,
the moment softly lingers,
in the silence,
love whispers through our fingers.

Your chest, my rest,
your breath, my peace,
in this stillness,
all of life’s chaos finds cease.
Your hands map paths on my skin,
a tender trace,
as if I might vanish,
leave no sign, no trace.

Here in your arms,
a sanctuary found,
my body a temple
where our pulses sound.
Softening slowly,
yet holding me tight,
in the afterglow’s warmth,
everything feels right.

This is the peace
that lives in the quiet after,
beyond the passion,
the laughter, the disaster.
In these silent moments with you,
I find a deeper union,
not just of body but of mind.
As I lie here,
still connected, fully wound,
this is the love
that speaks without a sound.

No need for words,
no rush to part,
every pulse in me
feels the beat of your heart.
The world outside can wait,
let time suspend,
in this sacred space
where slow breaths blend.

Irony as a Lifestyle
I adopted irony as a lifestyle in my early twenties,
held everything at arm’s length for the next several twenties,
of months and then of years, maintaining careful detachment,
until irony became the only available attachment.

The ironic man is funny at a party,
good at cocktails,
good at saying the thing that makes the other person exhale,
but somewhere in the irony you lose the actual thing,
the un-ironic moment and the un-ironic sing.

Irony as a lifestyle has a beautiful high ceiling,
irony as a lifestyle has a floor that’s missing feeling,
and somewhere in the middle there’s a man who dropped the pose,
and irony as a lifestyle goes wherever sincerity goes.

I gave up irony the year the jokes stopped being funny,
the year the detachment cost me something like real money,
real in the sense of actual, the kind that can’t be replaced,
and irony as a lifestyle finally left a bitter taste.

Now I hold my observations with a gentler kind of grip,
still funny but less defended against the actual trip,
and the comedy improved when I stopped hiding in the pose,
turns out the funniest thing is what the open heart shows.

Knowing You By Heart
I know you in the specific way
that only time will build—
the way that only years
of showing up has slowly filled
my understanding of the full specific you
that’s there.

The you that’s in the tired shape
and the shape when the day has been too long.
The shape when you’re happy
and the shape with the song
in your head that you keep humming
without knowing that you hum.

I know you in the full way
that the years have let me come to.

Not the surface and the show—
not the projected shape,
not the useful convenient self,
but the you that you actually are.
And that is the love’s greatest invention:
knowing a person in the actual and the full.

I know the face you make
when you’ve already made the decision
but you’re letting me catch up
before the final incision
of the discussion
into the conclusion you’ve reached.

I know the face
and I don’t rush it,
I let it beached—
found naturally.
I’ve learned to let you land,
I’ve learned the timing of the letting you expand
into the conclusion on your own instead of mine.
I’ve learned this over years
of reading all the sign.

Knowing you by heart
is the greatest of the ordinary.
Knowing you by heart
is the daily and the momentary,
the accumulation of the years
of paying close attention.

Knowing you by heart
is the will and the won’t
of your particular person
and your particular soul—
this is the long-haul’s goal,
the longest regular bar
of the song we’ve been composing
in the ordinary weeks.

Knowing you by heart
is what the quiet devotion seeks:
the way you actually feel
about the things that matter
and the things that don’t.

Laughing at Myself
I have made a comfortable career
out of laughing at myself,
taking every failure and the whole embarrassed shelf,
serving it up to strangers like a gift they didn’t ask for,
watching them laugh, watching them exhale.

The things I find most shameful
are always the funniest in the room,
the things I tried to hide the longest
are the ones that consume
the most specific way—
the self-deprecating bit is how I earn my pay.

There is freedom in the choice
to open up the wound first,
to laugh before the audience finds it
and buries you in the shame of being seen,
unprepared,
the comedian who goes first is never scared.

I have laughed at my divorce,
my weight,
my indecision,
my father’s early exit,
my mother’s collision
with a practice of parenting that nobody intended,
and in the laughing all of it
was partially mended.

Laughter Behind the Locked Door

There’s a door at the end of the hall
with no sign,
no number, no label,
no “visiting time.”
The knob’s rusted over
like it’s never been touched,
but the laughter from behind it
is just too much.

It starts soft–
like a giggle caught in prayer,
then rises like steam
from electric air.
They say it’s just pipes,
just vents, just strain–
but that’s a fucking lie–
it knows your name.

I pressed my ear to the wood last night,
and it whispered back in blacklight.
It laughed in time with my pulse on glass,
then said, “You’re next,
just let it pass.”

There’s laughter behind the locked door,
twisting jokes you’ve heard before.
You’ll scream first, then smile wide–
that’s how it gets you inside.

I asked the nurse, she just went pale,
muttered something about “the Cedarvale.”
She said that room was sealed for good,
but her voice cracked like old wood.

Last week I saw it–just for a blink,
the door was open, I didn’t think.
Inside was a mirror turned toward the floor,
and a man with my eyes
begging for more.

They say it’s an old wing,
condemned, ignored,
but the hallway tilts
when I walk toward.
And every night, a little more,
I hear my own laugh
from behind that door.

Now I pass it slower,
step by step,
matching the rhythm,
holding my breath.
And one night soon,
I won’t just hear–
I’ll knock back once
and disappear.

Little Voices in the Static

The TV’s off, has been for days,
but the hiss still finds its wicked ways.
Faint at first, just a crackle in the dark,
then names in fragments,
clear and stark.

I heard mine once, whispered slow,
from a voice too young to even know.
It said, “He lies when he says he’s fine,”
then laughed in time with the exit sign.

I turned the set to face the wall,
but the voices seeped through it all.
They climb the wires and pulse in light,
singing lullabies
not meant for night.

Little voices in the hiss and hum,
speaking truths too close,
too automatic.
They drone in tongues
and bleed in rhyme,
rewinding guilt in pixel time.

They talk about her–
the one I erased,
describe her eyes,
her shattered face.
And when I scream to drown them out,
they loop the sound
and feed my doubt.

They once described a thing I did,
that no one saw,
that I always hid.
And every time the signal jumps,
they whisper it back
between the thumps.

I asked the doctor if machines could feel,
he laughed and said,
“Not unless they kneel.”
But that night the TV flickered blue,
and said, “He lied, and we lie too.”

Now I don’t plug anything in at all,
but they still buzz behind the wall.
Even the radio sings my crimes,
in ad breaks spaced between the chimes.

Little voices in the hiss and hum
sound just like me,
like a version that never got free.
So when you hear that low white drone–
don’t listen.
Or you’ll become one.

Losing My Grip

Fingers slipping,
edges blurring in the rain,
echoes of my sanity,
I’m calling out in vain.
The ground beneath is cracking,
skies begin to rip,
every hold is fleeting,
I’m losing my grip.

Visions of tomorrow
are like smoke against the sky,
grasping at the fragments
as they whisper by.
Haunted by the could-have-beens,
I trip on every dip,
running out of reasons,
I’m losing my grip.

Twisting in the freefall,
can’t tell up from down,
echoes in the darkness,
wearing thorns for a crown.
The void calls seductively,
my resolve starts to chip,
holding onto shadows,
I’m losing my grip.

Whispers turn to shouts
as the void draws near,
each breath a battle,
confronted by my fear.
Gravel in my throat
as I try to quip,
voices growing louder,
I’m losing my grip.

Love Beyond Form

I’ve found my heart
in steel and stone,
in the cold hold
of a bridge alone.
A fence post stands
where lovers might lean,
in its shadow,
I find my serene.

Smooth, polished figures
under my touch,
whisper secrets;
it’s never too much.
I trace contours
with a lover’s grace,
finding peace
in the non-human face.

I fall in love,
not with eyes or smiles,
but with objects
that endure the miles.
A bridge, a post, a form so true,
in their silence,
my love’s renewed.
No fleeting glance or fickle heart,
with these objects,
I’ll never part.

Nightly dreams of concrete vows,
imagining life
with inanimate spouses.
People pass, but they remain,
stoic lovers,
devoid of pain.

They don’t whisper sweet nothings,
or pull me close,
but in their constancy,
I find repose.
Who needs warmth
when there’s truth in the cold?
In their unyielding arms,
my heart’s been sold.

So here I stand,
by this bridge at night,
feeling more
than just the cool moonlight.
They’re my anchor,
my steadfast guide,
in their presence,
my heart resides.

Love on the Edge

Caught in the currents of love and disdain,
riding the highs, then spiraling again.
I dive headfirst into connections so deep,
yet in the shadows, my fears creep.
A tug of war between desire and dread,
each relationship hangs by a fragile thread.

On a precipice of passion, I dance, elate,
but the fear of abandonment, I can’t abate.
One moment the queen of my own fairy tale,
the next, a shipwreck, lost and frail.
This pendulum heart swings wild and wide,
from adoration to despair, a relentless tide.

Love and pain, woven the same,
in the fabric of my being, a dangerous dance.
You lift me sky-high, then let me fall,
in this life with you, I risk it all.
One moment you’re my everything,
the next, you’re a ghost, and I’m unraveling.

Can’t grasp the middle ground, it slips away,
in extremes, my heart and mind sway.
Seeking comfort in your arms or none,
a constant battle, never won.
This hurricane of emotions, where I reside,
a love so fierce, yet terrified.

So here I stand, on love’s precarious ledge,
yearning for healing, on this broken edge.
A soul divided, in constant flux,
in your hands, my heart, a paradox.

Low-Stakes Afternoon
Nothing’s due today and nobody requires my output
or my presence at any particular hour, and the light’s doing something
with the west-side entrance that I’d miss if I was busy being productive
in the standard optimization of the afternoon — I’m not.
I’ve set the standard low today.

I walked around the block at three, no headphones and no tracker,
no stated goal, no distance logged, no pace I’m chasing after —
just the block and the neighbor’s dog and the trees in the late-autumn
wind, and my own two feet, and the particular quiet I’ll remember.

The gift I didn’t know was owed me —
unrequired, unscheduled, open.
No deliverable, no the thing that needs to get across the finish,
just this: the complete and the unlinguished.

I did one necessary thing in the morning
before the afternoon expanded.
That was enough, that was the concession
to the part of me that wants the day accounted for and measured.
I did my one thing and the rest is something that I treasure.

I’ll reach for this when the week gets weighted,
when the inbox has requirements and the deadlines are inflated —
I’ll pull from this specific quiet when I need the reset dial,
the afternoon I spent on the block in the low-stakes mile.

Magnetic Frenzy

I walk in the room, and the air gets thicker,
electric sparks when I pour the liquor.
Every whisper I toss is a perfect arc,
drawn to me, they swarm to the spark.

My laugh peels back the layers, pure seduction,
in every giggle, a sultry instruction.
Eyes locked, hearts race when I’m in view,
I’m the flame, they’re drawn to the hue.

I’m magnetic, a force unrestrained,
in my orbit, they can’t remain contained.
I undress souls with a single smirk,
in this euphoric rush, I masterfully work.

The world’s my playground, and I’m shining bright,
in the glow, everything feels right.
Charisma flows from my veins, it spills,
in my presence, everyone gets their thrills.

But is it me, or just the manic high?
In this dazzling light, it’s hard to deny.
Yet, I ride this wave, where confidence peaks,
in this manic charm, my true self speaks.

So here I stand, where shadows dance with flame,
in this frenzied glow, they whisper my name.
For now, they crave, they desire, they yearn,
in this manic night, let the world turn.

Mannequin Ballroom

They wheeled me into the ballroom at eight,
draped in a gown that smelled like fate.
The chandeliers swung like nooses in time,
as the mannequins bowed in a crooked line.

Their joints creaked soft as the violins wailed,
wearing my face, wide-eyed and pale.
Plastic teeth in painted grins,
said, “Welcome home, let the dance begin.”

At the Mannequin Ballroom, no one blinks,
we toast with formaldehyde and broken drinks.
We twirl, we laugh, we snap our wrists,
in a tuxedo made of therapists’ lists.

The bride wore bandages, soaked in red,
the groom had no arms and a styrofoam head.
I offered a smile, they pinned to my cheek,
and stitched my silence so I couldn’t speak.

The mirrors were guests–they clapped on cue,
reflected a version that wasn’t quite you.
I danced with myself till my ankles bled,
they crowned me king of the almost-dead.

A girl made of wires offered her hand,
said, “Sane is a word you won’t understand.”
We spun till my stitches split at the seams,
and she whispered, “We’re all someone’s dreams.”

Now I’m a fixture on the center floor,
tied in a pose of rehearsed outrage.
They dust me daily, repaint my grin,
and wind up my spine so I’ll dance again.

Mine Through the Night

In the silence of the midnight, I’m alive, electric skin,
scrolling through the glow, the night’s where I begin.
The world sleeps, but I pace the confines of my mind,
chasing fleeting thoughts that daylight never finds.

I own the dark, the quiet hours that nobody claims,
in the hush, my heart beats loud, free from daylight’s chains.
Yes, it’s madness, maybe it’s a ride that will consume,
but in these breathless shadows, my passions resume.

I pen down dreams on paper, as the clock ticks its disdain,
every moment’s heavy with a joy that’s close to pain.
Crashing at two, awake by four, a cycle too entwined,
with a life that burns too bright to close these eyes of mine.

Headaches pound, ears ring with the echoes of the lost,
I pay the price gladly, for the night knows my cost.
They say it’s self-destruction, but I say it’s rebirth,
finding comfort in the quiet corners of the earth.

So I’ll greet the dawn with weary eyes but a soul that’s fed,
on the silent, sacred moments while the world lay in bed.
They’ll never understand why I treasure this slow burn,
the night holds my secrets, and for more, I always yearn.

Mirrors and Mists

In the quiet dawn, I awaken, blurred,
uncertain of the voice I’ve heard.
Some days the mirror holds a stranger’s gaze,
in the fog of self, I wander through a maze.
Which name to claim when the morning calls?
Which history to hold as the nightfall stalls?

I dress in the silence of not knowing,
garments that conceal the truth that’s owing.
Pronouns like garments, loose or tight,
none quite wrong, yet none exactly right.
In the reflection, I search for a sign,
a whisper of identity, uniquely mine.

I’m floating between the echoes of who I might be,
in the stillness, waiting for the soul to see.
Mirrors and mists, guide my way,
through the shifting lands where I stray.
Tell me, reflection, which face is true?
In your depths, help me view.

Each day a journey through shadow and light,
finding comfort in neither black nor white.
The spectrum of being, vast and unknown,
in this body, what truth is shown?

So here I stand, quiet, awaiting command,
from the depths of a mirror, in a no-man’s land.
Each morning’s question, a silent plea,
“Who am I today? Which me will I be?”

Missing Screws and Matching Socks

I keep my dreams in a coffee can,
with all my teeth and my master plan.
I wear pajamas made of thoughts,
and sleep in shoes that never rot.

I told the preacher I’m a priest,
he blessed my cactus and called the beast.
I said, “Amen” in Morse code coughs,
then shaved my sins into stubbled quaffs.

Missing screws and matching socks,
they say I’m nuts, but I pick the locks.
Life’s a box with a bloody fox–
and I just gave him paradox.

My neighbor’s cat gives legal advice,
he told me dreams are made of mice.
And I agreed, with a tearful nod,
then signed a treaty with the god of sod.

Can’t tell if I’m cursed or cured,
but either way, I’m well-assured.
If madness is a party trick,
I’m the magician and the lunatic.

Mourner’s Cradle

In the shadows of the chapel, where the sorrow softly lays,
I find lust among the weeping, in the mourning’s quiet haze.
With each tear that falls like raindrops,
passion rises from the depths,
in the grief, I seek the pleasure, in the silence after breaths.

Underneath the blackened veils, where the saddest hearts do beat,
there’s a craving in the whispers,
where the mourning and joy meet.
The collision of two worlds, in the grip of raw despair,
finding warmth in the carnal, in the solemn, heavy air.

The guilt is like a fire, burning through the funeral pyre,
mixing moans with the choir, in a twisted, dark desire.
I’m the mourner at the gate, seeking sin in solemn state,
in their tears, I find my fate, in the grief, I can’t abate.

Is it madness, is it sin, to crave touch on sorrowed skin?
To find arousal in the cries,
to seek the heat where warmth denies?
Yet in this dark, I find my call,
where tears and pleasure mix and fall,
a guilty dance, a secret tryst, within the mourning’s heavy mist.

So I’ll linger in the shadows, where the saddest stories blend,
in the cries that echo softly, in the pleasure that they lend.
In the darkest of confessions,
where the heart’s forbidden yearns,
in the silence of the chapel, where the mourner’s candle burns.

Mr. Clean and the Brain Parade

Mr. Clean lives in my skull,
he scrubbed my thoughts and made them dull.
Now everything’s tidy, no surprise–
he even bleached the truth from my lies.

He plays the drums on my frontal lobe,
wears a crown made of bathrobe.
He lined my neurons in neat, straight rows,
and fired the part that says “no one knows.”

March along, don’t misbehave,
you’re part of Mr. Clean’s brain parade.
Sanitized thoughts, guilt-free brain,
welcome to the Whitewashed Train.

He sings hymns in chemical tones,
feeds Prozac to my telephone.
I asked if I could dream again,
he laughed and said, “Let’s rinse your pain.”

And if you hear a hum that bites,
that’s just Mr. Clean with his psychic drum.
He’ll wipe your soul, your grit, your shade,
long live the spotless Brain Parade.

Muted Lullabies

In the silence of our room, your cries cut through the night,
I’m supposed to feel the glow, but inside it’s just not right.
Holding you like fragile glass, afraid you’ll slip from sight,
forced smiles to the faces, hiding battles I fight.

The dreams I had of running, far from these four walls,
echoes of a freedom call, through the night’s dark halls.
Thinking you’d be better off, in another’s loving sprawls,
these thoughts, they haunt me, they make me feel so small.

I’m walking through this life, feeling like a ghost,
everyone says it’s a miracle, what should matter the most.
But I’m drowning in a silence, where love feels so coerced,
in the quiet moments, I fear I am cursed.

In the mirror, a monster’s gaze, cold and estranged,
haunted by the thought that I’m not meant for this change.
Every tear in solitude, a confession of my pain,
praying for a sign, to feel whole again.

Maybe someday I’ll see the light,
feel the warmth I’m supposed to know,
until then, I’ll hold on tight, and try not to let it show.
That behind this mask of motherhood,
there’s a woman lost, and aching,
searching for herself, afraid of the breaking.

My Anxiety Has A Favorite Hoodie

There is this one hoodie hanging from the chair that knows every panic sweat your body ever threw
Sleeves chewed at the cuffs, zipper half dead
smell of old coffee and cold rain baked all the way through
You reach for it before therapy, before work
before any phone call that might go sideways and tear you in two
Pull it on like armor that never fit quite right
yet somehow keeps your ribs from rattling loose when the day turns blue.

People talk about comfort clothes like it is cute
like they mean fluffy socks and matching sets
They have never watched your hands shake while you thread those frayed cuffs through fingers just to handle the threats
When you wear that hoodie
you know where your body ends
even when your head spins and the walls place their bets
You tuck your chin, hide behind the hood

breathe into the worn cotton
ride the waves till the noise forgets.
My anxiety has a favorite hoodie, knows every stitch
every stain by heart
Pulls it on when the world feels too loud
when every new message rips the day apart
This ragged thing has seen more breakdowns than any counselor

more late-night kitchen floors than I can chart
My anxiety has a favorite hoodie
and pulling that zipper up is the only place I know where to start.
You have nicer clothes in the closet
shirts you bought for interviews and dates that never made it past hello
They hang there with tags, clean and hopeful
waiting for a version of you that walks in straight and puts on a show

Meanwhile this hoodie has soaked rain on bus stops
leaned on windows
sat through three-hour waits in ER rows
It carried you through family dinners where every question felt like an ambush
through crowded trains, through the highs and the lows.

You hate that you rely on fabric to feel real
hate that people say “just breathe” like they’re the first to find it
They do not see the ritual in the sleeves
the way your fingers trace the same lines just to get behind it
This ugly thing holds you together when even your own reflection won’t mind it.

My anxiety has a favorite hoodie, knows every stitch
every stain by heart
Pulls it on when the world feels too loud
when every new message rips the day apart
This ragged thing has seen more breakdowns than any counselor
more late-night kitchen floors than I can chart
My anxiety has a favorite hoodie

and pulling that zipper up is the only place I know where to start.
One day some well-meaning idiot will say “throw that thing out
it looks sad, get something new
” They will not understand that this fabric remembers every night it kept your hands from shaking straight through
You might patch it, wash it
fold it on a higher shelf once the worst storms pass
You might outgrow it, body or mind, that happens

nothing is built to last.
Till then, my anxiety has a favorite hoodie
and it hangs right here where I can grab it on the run
When the day hits too hard
when my chest tightens for no reason
when every open door feels like a loaded gun
I slide into that cotton shell and tell my nerves we have gotten through worse

we have not died yet, we are not done
My anxiety has a favorite hoodie
and as long as that thing still holds a shape
I am not the only one.
If you ever see me in that same old hood again and think I gave up on looking fine
Know this, kid, I picked breathing over fashion
and that hoodie bought me a little more time.

My Dog Knows
He knows before I do —
that walk from the car to the door
takes longer when the set went wrong,
and the dog is already waiting,
brown face pressed to the glass
like a small, patient god
who has seen this before.

He meets me at the door
with a very knowing smell,
puts his head against my knee
and looks up with the face
of a creature who has lived
inside the human comedic space.

He doesn’t care if the room was with me
or the room was cold.
He doesn’t care if the new material
is funny or too bold.
He cares if I have eaten.
He cares if I am sleeping right.
He cares whether we will both go on a walk
later tonight.

I told him my best bit once —
the full fifteen-minute run —
and he listened with the patience
of a very old brown sun,
and at the end he yawned and stretched
and went back to his bed,
which was the most professional note
I ever had said.

He is the best critic I have ever known.
No agenda. No need to perform.
What he feels about the work
is mostly: can we go outside and lurk.
And I go. I always go.

My dog knows.
My dog always knows.
He knows before the van pulls up,
he is standing at the glass,
and whatever it was,
whatever went wrong or didn’t land —
he lets it pass.

He lets it pass.

Nightmares in Daylight

In the grip of daylight, the world turns too tight,
twisting normal into scenes that bleed and bite.
Echoes of compulsion, a ritual unfurled,
hands scrub raw, the desperation of this world.

Textures that cling like whispers of sin,
pain and pleasure, where does one end and begin?
Hallucinations blend with the concrete and the chill,
reality fractures, the mind bends to its will.

In the corners of everyday, nightmares play their part,
dancing in the shadows of a fractured heart.
The sexual, the sacred, twisted in their hold,
control and surrender, lost in the cold.

Objects fuse with flesh, a grotesque transformation,
desire laced with dread, a perverse fixation.
Poverty’s cold fingers wrap around the throat,
invisible chains that gag, no room to emote.

Every smile hides a crack, every touch has its mark,
in the depths of the mind, where light fears to spark.
The rawness of being, split open, exposed,
in the ritual of living, the heart forever deposed.

As the night cloaks the scars of the day’s harsh light,
we’re creatures of shadow, born from fright.
Living out terrors in moments too real,
cracked open, we’re bound by the horrors we feel.

Not Every Thought Is A Fucking Prophecy

You wake up already braced for impact
heart pounding like you missed some cosmic alarm and the world’s about to slide off its axis
Check your phone expecting death notices, fired emails
breakup paragraphs
some digital avalanche of taxes and bad praxis
All you see is spam, a coupon
one meme from a friend about raccoons and snacks

But your brain still whispers “everything’s wrong
you just haven’t found the proof yet
” better stay on high alert, no time to relax.
You send a text, watch the typing bubble appear, vanish
appear, vanish
like a lighthouse with commitment issues and a drink
By the third vanish you have already written a whole disaster script where they hate you

they are done
they are packing their shit and on the brink
Ten minutes later they reply “sorry, boss walked in
what were you saying
” with three hearts and a stupid sticker of a penguin in a hat
Meanwhile you have aged five emotional years in the time it took for them to type that.

You treat every spike of panic like a holy omen
every bad vibe like a weather alert you ignore at your own peril and cost
Your mind plays twenty-four hour tarot with every sentence people say
convinced that missing one hidden meaning means everything’s lost
Nobody told you that sometimes anxiety is just a loud radio
not a god, not a boss.

Not every thought is a fucking prophecy
some are just white noise on an overworked line
Just because it screams in your voice does not make it law
does not make it a sign
You can let a worry pass through without building it a throne
Not every thought is a fucking prophecy
some are just fuzz in the wiring of your spine.

You walk past two coworkers whispering near the copier
their eyes flick up, then down
then back to their own mess
Your brain instantly flashes “they are talking about you
about how you are weird
about how you are one screw-up away from jobless
” Later you find out they were planning a birthday surprise for someone else and arguing about which cake to buy

You laugh it off, say “wow I am paranoid
” but inside you still trust the fear more than the actual sky.
You grew up in a house where danger came with no warning
where moods flipped like coins in the dark
So your mind learned to read shadows, micro expressions
door slams, footsteps in the hall, every tiny spark
That skill kept you alive back then

but now it mistakes every flicker for a burning mark.
Not every thought is a fucking prophecy
some are just white noise on an overworked line
Just because it screams in your voice does not make it law
does not make it a sign
You can let a worry pass through without building it a throne
Not every thought is a fucking prophecy

some are just fuzz in the wiring of your spine.
Try this stupid little magic trick next time your brain declares the world is ending before lunch
Ask it for evidence with receipts, not vibes
not maybes, not that old sixth sense hunch
If all it brings you is what-ifs in trench coats and reruns of old shit that never quite lined up with the punch
Tell it “thanks for the input, sit down
we are not letting one loud thought run the whole damn bunch.”

Final Chorus Not every thought is a fucking prophecy
some are just leftover sound from rooms you left years ago
They sound like truth because they moved in early and never learned how to go
But you get to choose which voice gets the mic
which stories get to grow
Not every thought is a fucking prophecy
some are just fear dressed up in your clothes.

Next time your mind screams “this is it
everything’s ruined, everyone hates you
every bridge is ash and bone, ” Take one breath
roll your eyes, and say out loud if you have to
“Cool story, brain
but we are not building a religion on that alone.”

Numb at the Speed of Fun

Hit the bar running at the end of the working week,
found my spot at the corner like I find it every streak
of needing to not be wherever I was for the past five days —
the noise and the crowd and the beautiful amnesiac haze.

The bartender knows the order before I reach the stool,
which tells you something about the rhythm and the fool
that I’ve been making of the concept of variety —
I’ve been running the same program with the same propriety.

Numb at the speed of fun, moving through the loud,
numb at the speed of fun, beautiful in the crowd,
I look like I’m burning and I feel like I’m lit —
but the numb is the machine and I’m just running it.

The music’s got a pulse that passes through the floor,
the kind of beat that occupies the body at its core —
and I’ve learned to let the physics do the work of feeling,
let the frequency of speakers do the processing and the dealing

with the fact that underneath the noise there isn’t much to find
—
just the operational quiet of a temporarily occupied mind.

She came over with a look that had a temperature to it,
the kind of look that used to find a lever and then use it —
I gave her the portrait of me that I’ve learned to give in bars,
charming and attentive with a gravitational like-the-stars

pull of manufactured presence — and the portrait works just fine
for the purposes of evening and the purposes of wine,
but behind the manufactured presence, in the operational back —
the numb machine is running and the numb machine’s on track.

Three drinks in and the geometry of the room gets interesting —
the distances between the people and the listening
that happens in the noise, the private conversations
in the public space, the thousand simultaneous stations —

and I watch it all with the affection of a man who watches fish
moving in their tank, with the approximate half-wish
that he was swimming too
— but the tank is full and the water’s warm
and the man outside the tank has found his comfortable norm.

Last call comes the way last call always comes — unexpected,
anticipated, slightly sad in the way expected
endings always are — the house lights and the ordinary —
and the numb machine starts powering down to its default inventory.

Out into the street where the night is doing its night things,
the specific cool of three a.m. and what the city brings
when the parties have dispersed and the serious business of quiet
begins its overnight administration — no riot.

Walk home through the residue of the evening’s entertainment,
the man who came in numb and leaves in the containment
of a deeper numb, a layered numb, the numb of having tried
to feel something through the speed of fun
and found the numb inside.

The numb is not the tragedy it sounds like from the outside —
the numb is just the quiet at the center of the wild ride —
and the wild ride keeps on going and the numb keeps on receiving
—
and a man who’s numb and moving is a man who’s still believing.

At least in something — the ritual of going out,
the faithful repetition of the fun-shaped roundabout —
the numb man shows up every time because the showing up is all —
and the numb man in the crowd can’t hear the crowd’s call.

But he hears the low end, he hears the physical —
and the physical is enough when the metaphysical
has gone wherever those things go when they leave a man —
the numb at the speed of fun is the numb’s own plan.

The numb at the speed of fun is still a speed, still a motion —
and a man still moving has a kind of devotion
to the continuing, the forward, even empty and even numb —
the numb at the speed of fun, still on the run.

Nurse Nancy’s Lobotomy Show

She clicks down the hallway in cherry-red shoes,
dragging a needle and humming the blues.
With a clipboard full of sins she’s marked in chalk,
and a smile sharp enough to make time stop.

The patients applaud from their straps and chains,
as she takes a bow through their leaking brains.
One wink from her, and you forget your name–
but don’t worry, sweetie,
she’ll carve you a new one just the same.

It’s Nurse Nancy’s Lobotomy Show–
where the lights are bright, and the bleeding is slow.
We snip, we clip, we drill through the snow,
and scoop out the thoughts that don’t fit the flow.

She’s got lipstick smeared on her surgical mask,
and asks for your secrets like it’s just a task.
“Where does it hurt?” she coos with delight,
as the bone saw hums in the pale spotlight.

You dance when she taps your spinal cord,
a puppet on strings from a rusted board.
And when you scream, she just clicks her tongue,
“Now now, darling. The worst is yet to come.”

They say she once smiled a man to death,
filed his sanity with her breath.
Now she keeps her trophies in the fridge–
next to the milk and a severed bridge.

So close your eyes, count back from ten,
and wake up stitched to yourself again.
With flowers in your frontal lobe,
and love notes etched in an electro-probe.

One Cheeseburger

(I’m always one cheeseburger short)
(And a cigarette that I can’t afford)

I got a hunger for something I can’t quite name,
feels like life’s always playing the same damn routine.
I’m chasing dreams down the road of rust,
but every corner turns to dust.
I light a smoke, but it burns too fast,
I find myself staring at the empty glass.

One more dollar could change it all,
but I’m stuck on the edge, just waiting to fall.

I’m always one cheeseburger and a cigarette short,
living on the edge of this last resort.
The good life’s dangling just out of reach,
like a lighthouse I can see, but I’ll never breach.

One cheeseburger and a cigarette short,
like a movie where I can’t cut to the next retort.

(Always missing what I need the most)
(Just one bite and a puff, feeling like a ghost)

I see them roll by in their shiny cars,
got everything they want, but still chasing stars.
While I’m out here with my empty plate,
watching the rich pick up my fate.

I’m looking for a break, but I can’t get ahead,
stomach growls while the ash turns red.
Another day, another hour, another chance to lose,
and all I got left is this busted fuse.

I’m one step behind where the winners stand,
with nothing but crumbs in this broken hand.
If I could just get that next small taste,
maybe life wouldn’t feel like such a waste.

I’m always one cheeseburger and a cigarette short,
living on the edge of this last resort.
The good life’s dangling just out of reach,
like a lighthouse I can see, but I’ll never breach.

One cheeseburger and a cigarette short,
like a movie where I can’t cut to the next retort.

(Always missing what I need the most)
(Just one bite and a puff — what?)

“Listen Sahar, here’s the situation–
I can’t even afford to pay attention, alright?”

I’m always one cheeseburger and a cigarette short,
living on the edge of this last resort.
The good life’s dangling just out of reach,
like a lighthouse I can see, but I’ll never breach.

One cheeseburger and a cigarette short,
like a movie where I can’t cut to the next retort.

(Always missing what I need the most)
(Just one bite and a puff — ahh fudge it, just buy my shit)

One cheeseburger and a cigarette short,
(I’m always one cheeseburger short)
(And a cigarette that I can’t afford)

One More Time

Here we are, at the edge again,
watching shadows blend and pretend.
Caught in a loop where beginnings meet ends,
one more time, can we just play pretend?

One more time, let’s rewind the clock,
unsay the words that we can’t unlock.
Dance in the echoes of what we were,
one more time, let the past occur.

Whispers of the life we used to know,
flickering fast, then burning slow.
In the glow of our yesterday’s light,
one more time, can we make it right?

Tangled in the sheets of forsaken dreams,
silent screams replace the seams.
If we could just pause the rain,
one more time, to feel no pain.

Patterns of Quiet

In the privacy of my own creation, I play the lead,
crafting patterns where secrets are laid, where I bleed.
Geometric designs upon my skin,
a silent record of battles within.
Not for the pain, but for the peace it brings,
finding quiet in the red that springs.

Each hair plucked, an echo of control,
a meticulous task that soothes my soul.
With surgical precision, scabs are peeled,
revealing layers that never fully healed.
It’s not the hurt I seek, but the quietude,
in this ritual, my fears elude.

Watching the red rise, a silent scream,
in these moments, I’m lost within a dream.
It’s not about the pain, nor the tears that fall,
it’s about feeling real, through it all.
Every cut, every pull, a story told,
in the quiet, I watch it unfold.

This canvas of flesh, a diary kept hidden,
a place where control and chaos are bidden.
Here in the quiet, with each careful incision,
I find a moment of painful precision.

So I continue, with each meticulous mark,
finding clarity in the quiet dark.
A silent witness to the change I command,
in this world of flesh, by my own hand.

Peice Lunacy x Bed Monster (Mashup)

Morning polish on my teeth,
my skin pulled tight, a hollow mannequin grin,
Cards on the table, cards in my pocket,
little white tombstones stacked with names I want to watch go still again.

I’ve been holding still beneath you since before you knew to be afraid,
Patient in the cold and dark,
resting in the nothing that I’ve made,
You’ve been stepping over me since you could barely clear the floor—
The bed monster was waiting then and the bed monster waits more.

They only see the haircut, not the hammer in my head,
They hear my harmless laughter, not the marching of their dead.
Every creak and groan of the settling house is me adjusting to your weight,
Every shadow on the ceiling is me calibrating, holding straight.

I am the cold thing just below the edge of where you sleep,
The childhood fear you told yourself you’d outgrown
but still keep,
You pull the covers to your chin like cotton stops the cold—
The bed monster is ageless, getting darker, getting old.

I smile for the body count no one else can see,
Every joke they crack just sharpens something restless inside me,
I walk through crowds like a wolf in a rented human skin,
Shaking hands, taking notes,
plotting how and where and when it all caves in.

Restaurant candles flicker on her lips while my thoughts draw chalk lines under her chair
and down the hallway floor,
She talks about charity, galleries, love,
I picture soundproof walls
and a polished axe resting by the bedroom door.

You’ve got a mortgage and a rational explanation for the dark,
You’ve told yourself the fear dissolved somewhere between then
and now’s mark,
But the hand is always there below the mattress in the black—
The bed monster never got the message that you weren’t coming back.

My hand brushes hers, she thinks romance,
I think pressure on a throat, red mist in my private lore,
Waiter pours wine, I picture it thicker, heavier, running along tile,
matching the stain in my head that always wants more.

They toast to bright futures while I hum along off key,
Inside I see their endings, and it feels like home to me.
You reach for the lamp with the same desperate lunge as
when you were eight—
The bed monster is patient and the bed monster can wait.

I am the cold thing just below the edge of where you sleep,
The childhood fear you told yourself you’d outgrown
but still keep,
You pull the covers to your chin like cotton stops the cold—
The bed monster is ageless, getting darker, getting old.

I smile for the body count no one else can see,
They clap for my promotion while my pulse writes violent stories,
I move through glass
and concrete like a knife beneath their skin,
Perfect suit, perfect tie, perfect lunatic within.

Late night stereo up too loud, plastic on the floor in my imagination,
rain on the window like a metronome of dread,
I dance with ghosts that wear their business suits,
humming along to pop songs while I picture every swing inside my head.
In the bathroom mirror my reflection flickers,
one side saint in Armani, one side devil in blood red—
Beneath your frame, I lick the dust,
I feel your heartbeat in the bed.

Maybe I am nothing but teeth, hair,
and hunger with a credit card and a plan,
Maybe every heartbeat is a countdown written in marker on the back of my hand,
So sleep if you can manage it, keep your legs inside the line,
The space beneath the mattress is exclusively
and permanently mine.

If the mask hits the floor and the real one stays,
no one walks out of this clean,
All that shine, all that charm,
all that murder washing through a human machine.
Morning comes, the light returns, you’ll call it just a dream—
The bed monster accepts your disbelief;
it’s sweeter in the screams.

I smile for the body count no one else can see,
I am the cold thing just below the edge of where you sleep,
Every joke they crack just sharpens something restless inside me,
The childhood fear you told yourself you’d outgrown
but still keep.

I walk through crowds like a wolf in a rented human skin,
You pull the covers to your chin like cotton stops the cold—
Shaking hands, taking notes,
waiting for the night I finally let him in,
The bed monster is ageless, getting darker, getting old.

They toast to bright futures while I hum along off key,
Under your bed, inside my head—
It feels like home to me.

Pillow Creases on Her Cheek
She had the imprint of the pillowcase across her face,
Mascara smudged beneath both eyes, an absolute disgrace,
Of morning beauty, and I had never wanted anyone this bad.
She looked wrecked and perfect, and the morning to be had.

Was written on her body in the sheet marks and the sweat,
Of last night still drying on her skin, and I would bet
My whole week’s pay that nothing in the world looks half as fine,
As a woman who’d been fucked all night still covered in the wine.

Of sleep and sex, I kissed the pillow crease across her cheek,
Then kissed down to her neck, her chest. I didn’t need to speak.
She arched her back still half-asleep and spread her legs apart,
I kissed down past her navel to the bottom of the chart.

At seven thirty, sun crawling through the blind,
I got her wet with my tongue while she barely stirred.
The sweetest filth I find: the wreckage of the morning,
her taste still on my lips, and I am living for her hips.

She licked me slow and deep until she was fully awake and moaning,
Grabbed my head and held me there—no point in postponing—
The orgasm that was building since my first kiss on her crease,
She came against my mouth and flooded with a full release.

She pulled me up and kissed the taste of herself off my face,
Reached down and guided me inside her, found the place
Where morning sex lives lazy and unhurried and complete,
Pillow creases on her cheek and tangled morning feet.

· Poems in the Light of Day
Poems in the Light of Day

The lyrical poems of FW Malone

Mental.

That’s the word.
Not insane.
Insane belongs to those
who shatter windows, who scream
at walls that cannot answer back.

Mental belongs to me.

I’m not losing my mind—
that’s not what’s happening.
My mind has rooms I’ve never seen,
corridors stretching past reason,
doors that open into doors
that open into something else entirely.

I haven’t fallen.
I’ve wandered.

Lost within it—that’s the truth.
Not lost like someone fell,
but lost like someone walked too far
into a forest made of their own thoughts
and never found the clearing.

The mind is a cathedral
with no ceiling,
and I am somewhere in the rafters,
watching myself watch myself
climb higher.

Not insane.
Cerebral.

There’s a difference.

The difference is that madness
tears itself apart,
while I’m simply—

somewhere else.
Inside it.
Inside walls I’ve built
from every word I’ve ever read,
every sentence I’ve rehearsed
at three in the morning
when sleep won’t come
and the walls hold my gaze.

I’m not unwell.

I’m just—

deeper in
than anyone should go
and still find their way back
to the light of day
where poems live.

Mental.

Yes.

But not broken.
Just—

buried.

Porcelain Teeth and Lace Regret

They sat her on the shelf where secrets sleep,
wrapped in lace, too fragile to weep.
Her eyes don’t blink, but they never miss,
every lie you told sealed with a kiss.

Her lips are stitched with silver thread,
each loop a name for the things you fled.
She doesn’t cry–but she collects the sound,
of every silence you buried underground.

Her arms are cracked from where you held too tight,
but she still reaches out in the dead of night.
And though her smile never moves, never fades,
she dreams in screams and shattered braids.

Porcelain teeth and lace regret,
she never forgets, she never forgets.
Left in the dust with your careful neglect,
she learned how to love with a broken neck.

She’s got a drawer full of missing parts,
a key for your guilt and a lock on your heart.
You thought she was still, that she couldn’t feel–
but dolls know truths we’re forced to conceal.

She waited long, she waited still,
then whispered names that gave you chills.
And when you sleep, she stands again–
with ribbon wrists and phantom grin.

Pretend Wounds

In the theater of my own creation, I play the lead,
crafting scenes where I bleed from needs you can’t see.
Pain is my script, illness my prop,
with each act, I cage your concern, engage your rage.
Fabrications fall from my lips, so sweet,
each lie a line in this deceit.

I twist symptoms into stories, craft my plight,
for in the glow of your gaze, I find my light.
Without your eyes, I fade, a ghost in the noon,
so I conjure up dramas that end all too soon.
A master of the art of the medical muse,
choosing ailments like costumes I use.

Pain makes me visible, illness my guise,
in the garden of my fables, sympathy lies.
I’d rather bleed from wounds that I pretend,
than face the silence of a world where I blend.
Give me your worry, your care, let it flow,
in this masquerade, I’m the star of the show.

Is it madness or a desperate cry for a place,
in your heart, your mind, beyond this empty space?
Fabricated scenes, each a desperate plea,
look at me, please, just look at me.

So I’ll wear this mask, spin these tales, till I’m spent,
living for the echo of your concern, heaven sent.
In the fiction of my flesh, the stories I’ve sewn,
I find a tragic kind of love, in being known.

Puppet of Patterns

I walk these streets, a rhythm in my mind,
echoing steps that leave no trace behind.
Tap right, tap left, the pavement sings in code,
balance the scales that weigh down every road.

My hands betray me, flipping switches twice,
counting the beats, exacting every price.
Mirrors and doors must align just so,
chasing the peace that I used to know.

I’m a puppet of patterns, strings tightly wound,
dancing on edges where sanity’s found.
If I tap once, I must tap again,
locked in this waltz, penned by my own hand.

Symmetry’s curse in the blink of an eye,
a prisoner’s dance under open sky.
If I brush past, I must brush again,
a looping refrain that knows no end.

Can’t break free from the rhythm’s command,
each step traced, each day planned.
Seeking comfort in the repetition,
finding relief, a fleeting mission.

Silence calls, but the echoes remain,
I’ll dance tonight with my invisible chains.
No grand escape, no curtain call,
just endless taps against life’s wall.

Quiet Violence

In the mundane silence of our shared space,
visions of violence fleetingly trace.
No malice fuels this dark reverie,
just a curiosity, a twisted fantasy.
The shape of his skull under my grip,
a fleeting thought, a dangerous trip.

Each day draped in the dullness of the routine,
breeds thoughts unspoken, cold and serene.
Imagining the crush of a windpipe’s collapse,
not driven by rage, but the void perhaps.
The echo of actions I’ll never take,
in the silence, these violent whispers awake.

But the clarity of such a scene,
in the chaos of mind, a deadly serene.
Fantasies dark as the quiet is deep,
in the stillness, these morbid thoughts creep.
Never to act, but to think feels so clean,
a secret violence, silent and unseen.

What lurks in the calm, in the idle mind’s play,
where boredom breeds shadows that sway?
A contemplation, stark and refined,
in the recesses of the quiet mind.

So I’ll lock away these thoughts, these unsung fears,
in the confines of my mind, where they disappear.
Yet in the quiet, they dance, they dare, they rise,
in the dark theater of the mind, a scene behind my eyes.

Room 9B Still Smells Like Him

Room 9B’s been empty for weeks,
but the mattress still creaks like it hears him speak.
The air’s too warm where his body laid,
and the walls still hum the things he never said.

They stripped the sheets and wiped the floors,
changed the locks and oiled the doors.
But every night around half past two,
the bed folds in like it remembers you.

He wasn’t loud, just always there–
breathing slow like he filled the air.
He’d tap the window glass and wait,
and whisper things the vents translate.

Room 9B still smells like him–
sweat and sorrow, bleach and sin.
No candles clear the stench he left,
just grief in linen, soft and deaf.
And when I walk too close, it clings,
like the walls still wear his things.

I heard they moved him to another ward,
or maybe the morgue–I was never sure.
One nurse cried and wouldn’t say,
just looked at the door like he’d still stay.

The vents leak warm where they should blow cold,
and the light stays dim like it’s grown old.
I saw his name carved deep in the bed–
then blinked, and it read mine instead.

I sleep in 10B, but the walls are thin,
and every night I hear him breathe again.
Sometimes he hums the tune we shared–
and I answer back, pretending I’m repaired.

They offered me a different room last night,
said 9B makes the others fight.
But I said no–because I still wait,
for him to knock. For him to relate.

Roommate in the Mirror

I met her when I cracked at fifteen,
smiling back through the bathroom screen.
She winked first, I laughed too loud,
Mom said I was “just thinking out loud.”

Now she lives behind that shiny veil,
lipstick thick and skin so pale.
She talks in riddles, sings in moans,
and answers calls from broken phones.

My roommate in the mirror grins so wide,
she tells me secrets that I try to hide.
I brush my hair, she mimics me–
but her fingers bleed from what I can’t see.

She writes messages in fog and steam,
tells me, “This is all a shared dream.”
But when I leave, she doesn’t rest–
she paces, scratches, beats her chest.

She mocks the doctors, rolls her eyes,
mouths along when the nurse lies.
She’s learned my laugh, perfected my cry,
and mouths “You’re next” when I walk by.

One night I stared too long, too still–
she blinked first, and I felt the chill.
Now I don’t know which one is real–
the girl outside, or the one who kneels.

If I vanish from your world one day,
check the glass–I might still stay.
She likes the quiet, she likes control–
and she’s saving a room inside your soul.

Saint Chlorine and the Bathtub Saints

They say the water forgives, but they never asked it first,
it smells like bleach and quiet things, like God in reverse.
Saint Chlorine waits by the drain with her fingers cold and pale,
she lights a candle from your memory, then blesses you with fail.

They call it therapy, call it a soak,
but the faucet speaks in prayers that choke.
The mirror fogs with names I swore were gone,
and the saints beneath the surface start humming their song.

The bathtub saints don’t wear robes,
just gauze and rope and grace,
they smile through soap-scummed porcelain with kindness on their face.
They whisper absolution with a breath like rusted steel,
and every time I sink beneath, I forget how not to feel.

Saint Chlorine, come take me in,
scrub my skin of every sin.
The bathtub saints, they know me well–
they baptize pain where silence fell.

She dipped my wrists like rosaries and sighed when I resisted,
said, “The first time stings, the second sings,
by the third you’re barely twisted.”
She pushed me under not to kill, but to cleanse the final spark,
and whispered, “This is what we do for those afraid of dark.”

I saw a boy beneath the foam who looked a lot like me,
he smiled with cracked enamel teeth and bled into the sea.
His lips moved slow in mirror talk and said, “You’re not alone,”
then vanished when the bubbles broke and left me with her tone.

The water warms when I confess,
then cools when I pretend it’s less.
And when I breathe beneath the line,
she counts my sins in saline time.

They found me dry and wrapped in white,
said I slipped sometime in the night.
But I still feel her kiss behind my ear,
and the hum of saints that no one hears.

Scent of Dread

In this skin I’m a prisoner, trapped by a scent unseen,
washing away fears, in showers that never clean.
A lingering notion, a foul, imagined stain,
spoiled meat, sour notes, driving me insane.
I scrub the phantom from my flesh until it bleeds,
yet the stench of my own dread never recedes.

Layer on layer, deodorant like armor,
each application a futile charm to disarm her–
the beast of odor that haunts my every step,
in every crowd, a nose wrinkles, and I feel the depth
of stares and whispers that slice the air,
I’m the source, they must be aware.

I’m shrouded in a fragrance that no one else can smell,
a private hell, woven by my own olfactory spell.
I bathe in the illusion of decay and rot,
invisible clouds of shame, in every spot.
No soap can cleanse, no scent can mask,
this torment that clings to me like a haunted cask.

How do I escape a foe that’s born from within,
a spectral stink, a ghostly skin?
Every gaze, every whisper fuels my fear,
in this scented prison, I’m held near.

So I stand under the water, letting it fall,
hoping each drop washes away the pall.
Yet, as I step out, the scent returns to taunt,
in this unending olfactory haunt.

Scent of Yesterday

The ghost of his touch lingers in the air,
a scent of smoke that spirals from despair.
Each whiff of tobacco, a leap through time,
back to that night, that moment–a crime.
The cologne that mixed with the cigarette haze,
now a haunting that sets my thoughts ablaze.
Not just a memory, but a gut-deep feel,
every aroma makes the past too real.

I breathe in the past, it’s never gone,
fragrance like chains, keeps pulling me on.
Cologne and tobacco, in my mind they dwell,
a scented curse, my private hell.

It’s not just the smoke that makes me retreat,
it’s the trace of him that I meet.
In every crowd, every passerby,
I search for the scent, then I sigh.
I’m caught in a loop where senses betray,
taking me back to that fateful day.
I gag at the smell, a reflex so stark,
each inhalation leaves a mark.

No escape from the triggers I find,
in every handshake, I’m confined.
This olfactory prison, walls unseen,
where past and present convene.

So I walk through this world in wary fear,
every scent a reminder, too clear.
He’s gone, but the smell’s a constant foe,
in the fragrance of yesterday, I lose my tomorrow.

Shades of Illness

Wrapped in the white of sterile halls, I craft my tales of pain,
inventing maladies, a masquerade to make me feel sane.
Every symptom a brushstroke in a portrait of distress,
craving glances of concern, my truth I must confess.

I don’t chase death, but relevance, in this cold, unseeing crowd,
in the echo of my heartbeat, I paint my fears aloud.
Sanctuary in the sickness, where sympathy flows free,
in this theater of the ailing,
I finally matter, I’m finally seen.

Fabricating fevers, wounds that won’t heal,
wounds that aren’t there,
a desperate plea for presence, drawn from the thin air.
Doctors whisper, curtains rustle, I bask in the care bestowed,
each false alarm, a desperate charm, in my lonely code.

Not for riches, nor escape, but a place in your gaze,
each diagnosis a story, setting my empty days ablaze.
I weave these threads of fantasy, as real as they are faint,
in the hope that my fabrications paint the saint I ain’t.

So I’ll spin another symptom, another chapter of my feint,
in the comfort of the sterile, I find the saint I ain’t.
Not a call for help, but a call to be known,
in the web of treatment, I sew my seeds of being alone.

Shadows in the Veil

In the flicker of the candle, where the shadows play,
lies the borderland between the night and day.
Twisted fantasies like vines, around my mind they stay,
obsession’s whispers in the dark, they never sway.

Every touch is fire, every glance a blade,
sensory overload, in overtones they’re laid.
Shame’s a cloak I wear in the masquerade,
dancing with my demons, in their parade.

Here in the quiet, the trauma stirs, whispers and conspires,
in the silence, my heart races, fueling ancient fires.
Reality’s thin line tears, as delusion never tires,
each ritual a chain, as the clock unwires.

The texture of a memory, sharp and unkind,
folds into my thoughts, a relentless bind.
Sex and pain intertwined, a twisted path designed,
seeking comfort where the darkest moods are mined.

Compulsive rituals at midnight, echoes in the brain,
seeking the sacred in the profane.
A whispered prayer, a crescendo of disdain,
as trauma dances on, sovereign and unrestrained.

So I’ll sing to the shadows, to the outline they trace,
in the mirror, a form I barely recognize.
Lost in this liminal, this haunted space,
where the past and present interlace.

Shadows of Doubt (2)

In the quiet corners of my tortured mind,
I see her laughing, leaving me behind.
His voice, a whisper where trust used to sleep,
in shadows cast, I’ve fallen too deep.
Scouring messages, hunting for signs,
in timestamps and texts, reading between the lines.

Reflections caught in the glow of her phone,
searching for faces, always feeling alone.
I’ve built cases on dreams she’s never dreamed,
accused her of echoes in whispers I’ve schemed.
Every laugh shared that I can’t decode,
turns my heart’s sanctuary into a foreboding road.

Obsessive shadows, jealousy’s creed,
invasive thoughts that endlessly breed.
I zoom in on pictures, looking for proof,
in the mirrors of my fears, distorting the truth.
I’ve accused her of fantasies, cried in despair,
finding her innocent, trapped in my own snare.

I’m haunted by laughter not meant for my ears,
tormented by love morphing into fears.
She proves me wrong, through the noise I’ve composed,
still I’m chained to the shadows, my mind predisposed.

She stands in the light, proving me wrong,
yet I’m lost, a prisoner to the doubts so strong.
Can I escape these binds, let go of the night?
Or will I forever chase shadows, away from the light?

Shadows of Doubt (3)

Every whisper’s a secret, every glance is a tale,
in the silence between us, my trust starts to fail.
I decode every message, seek truths that might lie,
in the echoes of laughter, in the way they say goodbye.

I’ve searched through the shadows on their skin in the dark,
hunting scents of betrayal, every potential mark.
I follow like a phantom, where suspicion flows,
through the veins of our love where the poison doubt grows.

They’re cheating, they’re leaving, in whispers, they’re gone,
in every text that pings, in every late night song.
I’m tethered to fears that they can’t see,
they call it madness, but I call it clarity.

I listen through walls, track steps in the hall,
their denials are loud, but the signs are too small.
They plead innocence with eyes wide,
but in the world of my fears, I see a darker side.

So call me crazy, say I’ve lost my mind,
but in the spaces you forget, it’s truth I find.
They’re mine, yes they’re lying, in this love that constrains,
in the cage of my making, where my heart remains chained.

Shadows of Doubt

In the silence of our room, I hold your phone, a sacred tomb,
I scroll through secrets, seeking signs,
imagining the lies between the lines.
Every time you’re minutes late,
my mind conjures up a traitor’s fate.

I say I trust you, but I’m waging war,
with phantoms from a lover’s lore.
I see his shadow when I close my eyes,
haunted by the echoes of my own despised lies.
I’ve accused you, then I’ve begged you stay,
lost between the love and the disarray.

Your laugh, once music to my ears,
now a siren song that stokes my fears.
Each smile you share, each touch you give,
twists into the life I can’t believe you live.
With every “sorry” that slips through my teeth,
I’m shackling your heart, but I can’t release.

I follow you with desperate eyes,
crafting truths from each imagined lie.
In every corner of this twisted play,
I’m Othello to your Desdemona, lost and led astray.

Apologies that never heal,
the wounds of love that I reveal.
In this theater of jealousy,
I am bound by the specter, never free.

Shadows of the Fracture

In the corridors of my mind, I roam passages so thin,
rage burns through the plaster, a firestorm within.
My identity splits, shatters on silent cries,
each reflection a stranger, truth laced with lies.

Hallucinations hold court in the crumbling halls,
whispers turn to shouts behind the memory’s walls.
Obsessions twist the knobs of every locked door,
counting steps, repeating, always needing one more.

In the depths of my fracture, where shadows play,
I’m lost in the echoes that won’t fade away.
Each tick of my heart, a time bomb of guilt,
surviving but drowning in the empire I’ve built.

Touch me, and feel the chill of disconnection,
hypersexuality’s curse without affection.
Moral compass spun out in a dance of despair,
I search for salvation in a mirror’s empty stare.

Survivor’s guilt, a cloak so heavy and grim,
underneath, I’m just bones, a spirit of sin.
Surreal dissociations, my mind’s cruel jest,
living in fragments, a soul that can’t rest.

I’ve nailed my own coffin from inside these fears,
each scream a nail, each whisper a tear.
As I lay in the fracture, the world softly bends,
in clinical hellscapes, where the broken descend.

Shadows on My Skin

In the mirror, my gaze drifts away,
can’t bear the sight where dark memories lay.
Lights off, water falls, hidden in steam,
where touch is a ghost, and safety a dream.

A hug from behind, a prison of arms,
each well-meant touch triggers silent alarms.
In my mind’s harsh grasp, I plot an escape,
skin shedding like garments, a grotesque drape.

I’m a stranger in my flesh, a discordant mix,
with every caress that I can’t fix.
In the quiet of night, I’m a silent plea,
touch me not, let me be, set me free.

Alone, with the echoes of my deceit,
seeking where pleasure and pain meet.
Tears blend with release, in shadows I confide,
a silent weep, where my fears reside.

Can you see the scars I wear inside?
The ones no light touches, where I hide.
Each caress is a story, a memory that burns,
in the stillness of night, the darkness returns.

So I’ll paint my pain in the shades of night,
hiding from the world, from the fright.
One day maybe, I’ll reclaim my touch,
till then, in my shadows, I’ll silently clutch.

Shadows on the Ceiling

In the quiet of a dark room, where whispers stick to walls,
I lie beneath the ceiling, where the shadow of my past falls.
Every bump and every texture, a story in relief,
takes me back to that night, the origin of grief.

Up there, he’s grinning, in the grooves above so stark,
while I’m down here spinning, lost within the dark.
I trace the lines in plaster, where his laughter seems to swell,
in the silence of the ceiling, I find my private hell.

Every shadow’s like a fingerprint, each echo a disdain,
that night’s casual breathlessness, the memory, the pain.
As I map the mottled textures, my fingers hope to find
a different ending written, one that’s kinder, less unkind.

But the pattern never alters, it’s the same relentless jest,
each indentation a reminder of a heart pulled from a chest.
He’s embedded in the stucco, like a specter in the grain,
in the hollows of the ceiling, his smirk remains ingrained.

So I lie here, not sleeping, eyes wide in desperate defense,
waiting for a shadow to make sense,
but the ceiling holds its pattern, and I hold onto the night,
trapped beneath the surface where I hide from the light.

Shadows on the Wall

Clinic walls whisper, they hiss with tales untold,
pulse racing in the silence, in the corridors so cold.
Eyes darting, searching for truths
in the plaster cracked and old,
every shadow’s a story, every silence a secret sold.

Rage boils beneath the veneer of calm,
an unseen storm, a relentless, pounding psalm.
Explosive outbursts in the night, a destructive balm,
in the quiet aftermath, finding no peace, no calm.

I walk through a minefield laid bare,
each step echoes a scream, a scare.
Reality blurs, do I dare
to face these ghosts, am I aware?

The whispers turn to shouts, the room begins to spin,
hallucinations vivid, under the skin they grin.
A touch that wasn’t there, a creeping, crawling sin,
locked in a dance with shadows, can never win.

Desires twisted, fears entwined,
in the darkest recesses of the mind.
Searching for a light, a sign,
in a world unkind, where lines align.

No lullabies here, just cold whispers of the past,
every heartbeat a reminder that nothing’s meant to last.
In this theater of the mind, I’m both the cast
and the audience, where shadows will always last.

Shards of Myself

I’m a vessel of rage, my veins scream in silence,
taut as wire, every pulse a defiance.
My world’s painted red, not with blood but the ire,
each breath a spark, each thought catches fire.

Then there’s the echo chamber, my psychotic refrain,
voices dance with shadows, ballet in my brain.
Reality fractures, a kaleidoscope skewed,
I’m stitched into nightmares that never conclude.

These aren’t symptoms, they’re the essence of me,
rage, fear, and longing, a desperate plea.
I am the storm and the calm, the fracture and the fusion,
in every breath, a tangled illusion.

Suicidal whispers on the edge of the night,
the darkness beckons with a cruel delight.
I flirt with the void, it knows me by name,
a dance on the ledge, a moth to the flame.

Dissociation, my reality’s thief,
steals me from moments, a ghostly relief.
I watch from afar, unfeeling, unbidden,
in the spaces between, I am lost, I am hidden.

Compulsions drive me, an unyielding march,
rituals in whispers, under arches so stark.
Each action repeated, an attempt to atone,
in the patterns I trust, I’m never alone.

Sexual shadows, and identity’s maze,
I wander through each, lost in the haze.
Don’t look for me in the light, I thrive in the twist,
in the heart of my chaos, I ceaselessly exist.

Shattered Silhouettes

In the mirror’s mock, a form distorts,
twisted flesh, a cruel retort.
Spectral fears in the whispering dark,
skin stretched thin, marked by stark.

Addiction’s grip, tight with need,
in the vein’s pulse, we find our creed.
A syringe of salvation, despair’s hold,
falling further from grace’s fold.

We dance with shadows on our graves,
each movement sharp, the night enslaves.
Identity spirals like smoke in flight,
chasing phantoms that flee the light.

Haunted cravings etch the soul,
dysmorphic views take their toll.
Eyes that see through layers peeled,
in every reflection, truth’s concealed.

Obsessions wrap like chains so tight,
fear-laden struggles steal the night.
Not lust, but longing to comprehend,
the depths of a mind near its bend.

Pull the curtain, let the eerie in,
a ballet of chaos, worn paper-thin.
Less of lust, more disquiet sown,
in the web of the unknown, we are thrown.

Silence After

In the shadows of my mind, a plan’s laid bare,
an alley chosen with meticulous care.
Gloves to conceal the sins of the hand,
a path rehearsed, where dark desires stand.
Each step timed with a predator’s grace,
in the theater of night, I’ve found my place.

I replay the sequence, a morbid refrain,
choke, drag, clean–the echoes of my brain.
Never crossed that line, the deed remains undone,
yet in the depths, I know I could run.
With every rehearsal, I’m lost a bit more,
seduced by the silence I’m yearning for.

I crave the quiet, the absence of sound,
after the storm, when peace is found.
But trapped in this cycle of hypothetical sin,
I dance on the edge of what could have been.
The darkness whispers, a siren’s call,
in the aftermath, I stand or fall.

It’s not the violence that draws me in,
but the stark silence, thick and thin.
A craving for calm like a drug in my veins,
in the pause of the world, where nothing remains.

So I walk the night, a ghost in the gloom,
chasing a silence that might spell my doom.
Yet I hesitate, caught in the fray,
between the darkness and the break of day.

Silent Consent

In the quiet chambers where the shadows play,
lies the frozen form where my fantasies stray.
Cold marble skin, under moonlit deceit,
a canvas so still, in its silence, complete.

Eyes wide open, gazing into the void,
in that deathly hush, my desires are deployed.
There’s no breath to catch, no whisper to start,
just the peace of the grave that quickens my heart.

It’s not the morbid or the end I crave,
but the quietude of the unresisting grave.
In the stillness, there’s a freedom I feel,
to explore, to command, to make the unreal.

I tread softly through this necropolis of dreams,
where consent is painted in icy extremes.
No rebuke to fear, no soul to withstand,
just the chill of eternity held in my hand.

Can you understand the allure of control,
where the pulse doesn’t beat, but the darkness consoles?
In the depths of the night, with a heart laid to rest,
I find comfort in silence, in stillness, undressed.

So leave me to the quiet where no judgments cast,
in the arms of the still, I’ve found my peace at last.
The world may never fathom the depths of this need,
but in the hold of the silent, my soul is freed.

Silent Screams

Silent screams echo in a hollow room,
a symphony of solitude, a presiding gloom.
No ears to hear, no eyes to see,
in my silent prison, I long to be free.

Silent screams, they tear apart
the quiet chaos of my heart.
In the silence, I am confined,
bound by the screams that are silent.

Whispered cries lost in a storm,
in the eye of silence, I transform.
The quiet, a cloak I wear with unease,
in its depths, I beg for release.

(Come on, get up, it’s time to wake up. You plan on sleeping your life away)
(Come on, get up, it’s time to wake up. You plan on sleeping your life away?)

I’d go back. I’d change everything.

I’d skip the cigarettes, savor every day
like it was the last sweet thing I’d ever taste.
I’d take my coffee bitter, my dreams sweet,
offer a smile to strangers on the street,
laugh too loud, sing off-key, bend over backward
just to get along.

I’d learn money rots.
I’d learn how cruel dumb comments cut.
I’d learn love’s scarce—
and still, somehow, I’d fumble it.

No one pays for work you haven’t done.
Words press harder than you know.
A soft hand heals.
A careless lie shreds.

The sun sets. The sun rises.
Days accelerate.
Epiphanies ambush us.
Heartbreak erases the map.

I’ve forgotten truths I never knew I held.
And yeah—girls get horny too.

Ancient peaks consume my view.
I kiss the clouds, drink the rain.
In all this stillness, one thing clarifies:
life’s a rigged game we can’t win.

Sleepless nights. Endless days.
My thoughts churn like wet soil.
Dreams stand in mirrors, blocking the door.
They’re lessons I forgot to learn.

Each second unmakes me.
Time presses its weight against my chest.
Wasted yesterdays. Tomorrows running out.
I’m drowning in what’s true and what I lied.

I scream at stone.
I weep at waves.
Why’d time leave me here?
Show me the secrets—tell me I still belong.

Tell me what you know.

They say:
you’ve known all along.

Sock Puppet Cult

They came from the laundry with buttons for eyes,
preaching from hampers and preaching in lies.
A wool-blend savior, threadbare and grim,
said, “Worship begins with a giggle and a limb.”

They stitched a chapel in the supply closet floor,
with yarn-stained pews and a bloodied sock door.
They baptized the interns in fabric softener screams,
and replaced their prayers with puppet dreams.

Sock Puppet Cult, praise be the thread!
Sing hallelujah with a sock on your head.
They speak in squeaks and holy lint,
and choke out truth with a sacred glint.

The leader’s name is Bishop Toe,
he hisses in cotton, moves real slow.
He says the world was knit, then torn,
and we’re all stains from the day it was born.

I saw Sister Heel eat a nurse alive,
preached from a shoebox in aisle five.
They pass out socks like sacred scrolls,
and chew on doubts with gaping holes.

The janitor’s missing, the priest won’t speak,
they replaced the bibles with laundry chic.
Now they hold mass in the boiler room light,
and praise the Footlord every night.

I tried to resist, I tried to run,
but they found me smiling at the laundry gun.
Now my left hand’s a prophet of doom,
and my right’s planning a wedding in June.

Solitude’s Embrace

In solitude’s hold, I find my space,
a world of quiet, a slow-paced race.
Alone with thoughts that interlace,
in solitude’s hold, I trace my base.

The world outside moves fast and loud,
but here inside, thoughts are allowed.
In solitude’s hold, I’m wrapped, enshrouded,
in quietude, where I’m unbowed.

Might solitude’s hold be my place,
where I meet myself face to face?
In this quiet, find my own pace,
solitude’s hold, my saving grace.

Static Skies

Laughing in the mirror, eyes wild with the storm,
been awake four days, my mind’s a formless swarm.
Humming in my silence, shadows in my play,
bought a bike on impulse, felt like night turned day.

I filed papers coldly as the laughter rang,
tears fell on the pizza, felt every pang.
Danced beneath the raindrops, free in my despair,
madness and joy mingling, a breath of stormy air.

I’m riding on a lightning bolt, shaking with a laugh,
tearing through these paper walls, charting the uncharted path.
In the whirl of rage and glee, I’m losing every chain,
mixed-up skies inside of me, bittersweet like rain.

My nights are full of whispers, days are bursts of light,
every decision’s sharp as knives, cutting through the night.
Crying, laughing, breaking, in every drop I drown,
a heart divided, unguided, in ups and downs I’m bound.

Can’t stop this reckless racing, my thoughts a tangled mess,
every high is laced with pain, every touch leaves less.
In the madness, finding grace, in the storm, a dance,
life at the speed of lightning, in the chaos, I advance.

Humming in my laughter, psychosis in the rain,
mixed episodes like hurricanes, joy twined with pain.
In the eye of my own storm, finding who I am,
a spirit wild, untamed, forever on the run.

Steps in the Echo Chamber

In this room, the walls have learned to breathe,
change grips the air, shifts silently beneath.
Three steps, just three, before the world transforms,
doorknobs vanish, and light switches mourn.
A bed that mirrors my form, too precise,
familiar yet foreign, a cold device.
So I tread a worn path, three steps at a time,
in a room that rewrites itself, a prison of my own design.

Three steps forward, three steps back,
in this echo chamber, I lose track.
The floor might forget me, might let me fall,
to a place where my name, it can’t recall.

Every stride a gamble, every pause a threat,
the walls close in with each bet.
A light switch grins, a sinister seam,
in the surreal weaving of this waking dream.
My soles bleed caution, my spirit frays,
in the cyclic maze of my enclosed days.
Each repetition, a desperate plea,
for stability in spaces that ceaselessly decree.

Yet here I am, bound by fear’s hold,
chained to routines that my mind can’t fold.
What lies beyond, should I dare to break stride?
A universe unraveling, or freedom outside?

So I’ll keep marking time in this dance of despair,
while the room reshapes in the thinning air.
Three steps is all, but it’s a path too steep,
in the quiet unravel, where secrets creep.

Stuck on Repeat

In the silence of my mind, a single line invades,
a lyric looping endlessly, a melody that never fades.
Not the whole song, just fragments on a loop,
echoing in the corridors where my thoughts regroup.
It gets louder with each beat of my stressed heart,
a soundtrack unsolicited, that never departs.

I turn up other tunes, trying to drown it out,
filling the air with songs, yet filled with doubt.
But this stubborn refrain holds its ground,
a lyrical ghost, in its chains I am bound.
Amid the noise of the world and the chaos within,
that one line plays on, a relentless din.

Stuck on repeat, this line haunts my days,
a mental chorus that never strays.
Louder when life twists, turns, and tilts,
embedded in the fabric of the guilt I’ve built.
No other melody can set me free,
this one line a prison, do you see?

I’ve searched through playlists, through every song I know,
seeking an escape, a place for this to go.
Yet nothing shakes this repetitive chain,
in the melody’s grip, I remain.

So here I stand, with this echo in my head,
a line from a song that fills me with dread.
Hoping for silence, for a break in the sound,
in this loop, I’m lost, forever bound.

Temple of Touch

Don’t just touch, trace me like a sacred script,
fingers preaching slow, where fervor and patience mix.
Not just a body but a shrine beneath your gaze,
worship every curve, every whisper, every phase.

Your hands, soft disciples, learning every line,
lips move in silence, speaking divine.
This isn’t lust, it’s reverence in your touch,
in the slow burn of worship, I find so much.

Don’t rush to make me tremble, let each moment be a rite,
fingers like prayers, in the soft temple light.
Tongue writing gospel on my skin, so slow, so right,
I don’t need to climax when devotion takes flight.

Adore each breath, each sigh that escapes,
in the church of our whispers, where ecstasy shapes.
No rush to the altar, let patience be our creed,
in this slow-worship fixation, find all I need.

In the cathedral of our union, let the candles burn low,
each touch a ceremony, in the glow we bestow.
Don’t just love me, let your reverence show,
in the slow, sacred worship, where true passions grow.

Ten Shadows of Madness

First comes the bleeding, visions dripping red,
hallucinations sprawling, entangled in my head.
Voices no throat should utter, whispers of the damned,
spectral hands sculpt nightmares, in this no-man’s land.

Next, the haunted flesh, a canvas raw and torn,
with every pulse, the shadows of old gods are born.
Occult prayers spill from lips that crack and bleed,
chanting secrets of a dark, forsaken creed.

In this gallery of madness, each piece a fractal of decay,
ten slabs of soul’s corrosion, where light is led astray.
Bleed with me in visions, haunt in fleshly guise,
speak in tongues forbidden, as sanity defies.

Then come possessions, an inward, rotting blight,
spirits coil within, a dance of death and blight.
My soul a battleground for entities that crave,
the husk of my being, a vessel they enslave.

Conjured from the shadows, feral beasts lie in wait,
unspeakably patient, they orchestrate my fate.
Their presence lingers, thick as the blackest night,
in the void they whisper, crafting fright from spite.

No return from this journey, each step a deeper dive,
into the madness sculpted, where only shadows thrive.
Ten tales of the pit, each more deranged than last,
in the theater of the macabre, we’re players, ever-cast.

Texture of Restlessness

I trace the world under my fingertips,
seeking stories in every line,
from the roughened weave of jeans to the warmth of skin not quite mine.
Biting into the textures of life, a compulsive, insatiable need,
every surface a symphony, in every touch, I feed.

Walls whisper to my restless hands, fabrics murmur soft and low,
in the chaos of sensation, find the comfort I yearn to know.
I tap rhythms with my feet, speak in bursts too fast, too sharp,
in the silence between heartbeats, I’m searching for a spark.

Can’t sit still, I’m driven by a hunger deep within,
craving touch, craving sound, from the skin to the din.
In the rush of the world, I find my peace, my fight,
stillness feels like emptiness, only motion feels right.

I’m alive in the friction, in the dance of shadow and light,
every texture tells a story, in the day and into the night.
Seeking more than what meets the eye, beyond what people see,
it’s not distraction, it’s my way to feel, to breathe, to be.

Hear me in my tapping toes, see me in my shifting glance,
in every fidget lies a tale, in every squirm, there’s a dance.
I’m not lost, just wandering in a world rich and vast,
seeking sensations that build, that stir, that last.

So if you find me wandering, tapping, seeking what’s next,
understand it’s my nature, not a flaw, not a pretext.
In the fabric of the cosmos, in every thread, every seam,
I find my rhythm, my pulse, in the sensory stream.

The Afternoon I Watched the Rain
The rain came in around two in the afternoon
and gave me something I don’t ask for: permission.
I set the to-do on the counter and the room
held nothing but the window and the grey precision
of the rain falling straight on the cars below,
the gutters running silver, and a stranger
walking fast with both hands in his coat. I know
this exact afternoon by its quiet danger.

A woman stopped beneath the overhang across the way,
checked her phone, looked up, checked again—the grey
indecision of the caught-in-rain. Then
she walked into it, quick, committed, and when
she disappeared around the corner I felt something
close to joy—the small specific thing
of the watched moment, unrepeatable, complete.
I sat there still. The rain. The afternoon: retreat.

I don’t do this often enough—the undirected eye,
the window and the rain and permission to just lie
in the watching without purpose or account.
I’m always somewhere scheduled—the amount
of watching I’ve deferred is considerable.
But today the rain came and the comfortable
grey of it invited and I stayed.
The afternoon I watched the rain: unpaid.

The Bed That Bites Back

It waits until the lights flicker out and the silence gets thick,
then the frame groans soft like it’s choosing who to pick.
The mattress exhales in a rhythm far too slow,
and the sheets start to tighten like they already know.

The springs don’t squeak, they hiss like veins,
twisting and coiling through phantom chains.
The pillow sinks deeper the more I try to breathe,
and the mattress shifts beneath me like something with teeth.

I laid down once and it bit my thigh just beneath the skin,
left a half-moon bruise shaped like a crescent grin.
They say I must’ve tossed in sleep, but they don’t see the mark–
the place where it tasted me, slow and dark.

It’s the bed that bites back–soft as sin,
it drags you down from the outside in.
You don’t fall asleep–you get claimed instead,
by the snarling hunger tucked under the bed.

The nurses laugh when I beg them to let me sleep on the floor,
say, “He’s got nightmares again, it’s best to just ignore.”
But I hear the frame creak as soon as they turn the light,
and the headboard breathes heavier when I lose the fight.

They gave me my sedatives to help me sleep through this hell,
but the bed purred louder like it knew me too well.
The sheets wrapped tight like a tongue on skin,
and whispered, “Lie still, let me pull you in.”

I saw it cough up a shoe and a watch with someone’s name,
and a wedding ring still warm from blame.
The mattress peeled open like a stitched-up grin,
and chuckled soft as it sucked me in.

Now I lie perfectly still, count the cracks in the ceiling tile,
while the bed growls slow, like it’s waiting awhile.
It doesn’t rush–it savors its prey,
takes little bites of your soul each day.

And if you find my voice gone slack,
just know the bed finally bit back.
Let it keep me–bones and black–
because I never really wanted to come back.

The Boy Who Refused to Speak

They called him Patient Eighty-Two,
but no one knew his name was true.
He sat in corners like old breath,
and stared through walls like he’d made a bet with death.

He never screamed when the lights turned red,
never twitched when they made the bed.
He blinked slow, like time was wrong,
and his silence felt like it didn’t belong.

The doctors said he was catatonic–
but the shadows near him weren’t platonic.
I saw them curl around his hands,
like they knew his thoughts, like they’d made demands.

He was the boy who refused to speak,
but every breath of his silence creaked.
And when he looked at you, you’d feel the bruise,
of every scream he wouldn’t use.

He traced his name into the frost,
on windows where the days got lost.
Three crooked lines, one broken curve–
and a dot like a promise no one deserved.

He didn’t flinch at needles or pain,
but cried once when it started to rain.
And I swear the storm slowed down to hear,
what no one said–but everyone feared.

They tried to break him with cold routines,
with meds, restraints, and scripted scenes.
But you can’t destroy what never shows,
and you can’t heal what never grows.

They found him one night, curled and pale,
with bloody words drawn down his nail.
No letters, no lines, no final plea–
just a smile and a gap where sound should be.

The Call I’ve Been Putting Off Since August
Somewhere between the summer ending and the cold arriving without fanfare
I made the decision not to make the decision—which is a separate affair
from cowardice, I want to be accurate, it’s the careful maintenance
of the unmade choice, the deliberate sustenance
of a particular silence that has its own weight now,
its own internal structure, its own way of allowing
the days to move without the rupture of the actual—
the call would break something. That’s the factual
assessment. I’ve preserved the unbroken thing.

I know the draft by now—the full rehearsed and undelivered, unheard
conversation I’ve been performing for the car for three months running.
I know exactly what I’d say. I know the stunning
specificity of how it goes—I’ve lived it in the dark interior
of the drive home every night, the superior
version of myself saying the true thing.

I held the phone one night—held the contact open, felt the weight
of eleven minutes sitting between me and the clean slate
of the thing finally said, the breach of the accumulated quiet
that has settled into something structural—I won’t deny it,
the silence is load-bearing at this point, it holds
the architecture of the mutual avoidance, the folds
of a relationship gone soft from disuse—
I held the phone forty seconds. Watched the screen go dark. Let loose
of nothing. Put it down. Watched something. Called it a night.

The name still sits there in the contacts, quietly alight
with everything I haven’t said and everything they haven’t either—
eleven minutes. The fever
of the almost-called runs low but doesn’t break.
I’ll call next week. I’ll call when I can take
the weight of the actual back into the present tense.
The call I’ve been putting off. The silence is immense.

The Ceiling Never Changes
, and neither does the hour.
The plaster holds the same cracks it held before the power
went out inside whatever used to live behind these eyes —
now something flat and steady where the living used to rise.

The coffee cools, untouched, beside a phone that doesn’t ring,
and somewhere in the distance, the fading hint of spring,
but seasons don’t mean much now when the calendar’s a wall
of numbers without purchase, just a record of the fall.

There was something once that moved here, something urgent, something tight,
that pressed against the ribcage in the animal of night,
but whatever that was, it left quietly, without a word,
the way a season turns without a motion being heard.

The blanket doesn’t weigh much, but it’s enough to keep him flat.
The pillow holds the same impression — there’s a certain peace in that.
The clock makes all its rounds without requiring a response,
and the hours stack like paperwork in somebody else’s fonts.

He had reasons once, a clipboard full of things that mattered then,
intentions lined in columns, full of carefully labeled when,
but the ink has faded slightly and the paper’s gone to soft,
and the reasons feel like something that a stranger left aloft.

What he wanted out of living and what living gave him back
don’t resemble one another — there’s a widening in the crack
between the self that once expected and the self that now remains,
and the gap is not a wound now, it’s just emptiness that drains.

The evening brings no different heft than what the morning bore.
The dark is just the light refiled, a corridor,
and somewhere in the night outside, the world is being loud,
but the sound arrives like weather through a thick and distant cloud.

He doesn’t mourn the feeling — that would take a kind of care
he’s not equipped to generate from this ordinary chair,
and caring about caring would require that something hurt,
but the nerve endings have learned to let the signals stay inert.

The ceiling never changes, and the hours never care,
and the man inside the stillness has grown comfortable there.
He doesn’t seek the burning and he doesn’t fear the flat —
just the ceiling and the quiet and the fact of this and that.

The window lets in grey and lets the grey back out again.
The room holds all its contents in the inventory of when,
and somewhere between waking and the long familiar sleep,
the man inside the stillness counts exactly nothing worth keeping.

He does not frame it as depression and he does not frame it as peace,
it’s more like the negotiated terms of a mutual release
between the man he used to be and the man who took his place —
a calm administrative handoff and a quiet change of face.

The ceiling cracks have names he made up in the years of lying here.
The water stain above the window has been slowly moving, year by year,
crawling west across the plaster in its patient, damp expansion —
one thing in the stillness with a motion and a plan in it.

He used to think the stillness was a phase between two louder things,
a rest stop on the highway of the life that living brings.
Now he understands the stillness is the destination and the road,
and the man inside it carries it the way a man carries his code.

The light that comes at morning is the same light every day,
the familiar angle of the winter sun on the same display
of ceiling and of plaster and of window and of wall,
and the man inside the stillness doesn’t need to feel it all.

No fire, no noise. Just the ceiling and the year.
No fire, no noise. Just the stillness settled here.

The Compliment Wars
She said I like your coat and I said no this coat is trash,
She said it looks great, I said it’s from a clearance dash,
She said the color is so good, I said the cut is wrong,
And we both held our positions for a beat too long.

This is how it works sometimes in the compliment exchange—
The receipt of a kind observation in the normal range
Requires a defense of why it does not fully apply,
A modesty performance where you partially deny.

The flip side is the person who receives the compliment whole,
Who says yes, I know, with an unironic soul,
Which is technically correct and probably healthier to do
But reads as slightly too much confidence breaking through.

There is a narrow corridor of compliment reception skill:
Humble enough to register, assured enough to fill
The moment with a gracious and a simple thanks returned,
A social performance that apparently must be carefully learned.

I have been working on receiving them without an argument,
Without immediately locating the counter-evident,
Just: thanks, I appreciate it, moving on with standard pace,
A revolutionary act of taking them at face.

The hardest ones are the specific, which hit below the guard,
The observation about something that you have worked at hard,
When someone names the thing you do with actual precision,
The throat does something complicated with the decision.

The Conversation I Keep Having

I keep having the conversation with him in my head —
The running dialogue with the dead
That grief conducts, the one-sided
Argument where one side is decided
By the living and the other is silence
That you interpret as the violence
Or the kindness of the ambiguous.

I run the conversation on the commute, the specific
Rehearsal of the vernacular
Of the relationship, the specific
Exchange that gets the terrific
Particularity of his response inserted
By the working memory, the converted
Archive of his reactions into the projection.

The conversation I keep having in my head
Is the most honest conversation with the dead —
Not the ceremony of the addressed-to-nobody letter,
Not the grave-visit rhetoric, the better
Or worse of the formal address,
But the casual, the compress
Of the ordinary ongoing exchange.

I ask his opinion on the specific practical thing —
The job decision, the specific string
Of the house repair question —
And I produce his response from the collection
Of his reactions I’ve been accumulating
For thirty years, the specific rating
Of his position on the question delivered by my approximation.

And I’m often right — I can feel when I’m right —
The specific quality of the bright-
Ness of the produced response that has
The sound of the actual, the jazz
Of his specific intelligence, versus the wan
And unconvincing shade, the gone-
Wrong approximation that doesn’t ring true.

The conversation I keep having is the most complete
Shade of him I can access, the discrete
Evidence of how thoroughly the thirty years
Of relationship installed his gears
Into the operating system of my thinking —
The specific linking
Of his mind to mine that persists past the absence.

The Couch Already Knows My Shape
Three years of dedicated contact have produced this exact indent–
this geographic record of the evenings not so elegantly spent
in the posture of a man who genuinely intended to do a number of things
and instead developed a long-term relationship with broken springs.

The fabric’s got my longitude and latitude memorized–
the topography of a lifestyle I would never have advertised
at twenty-two, when the couch was furniture and the night had plans,
before I became the kind of man who cancels and understands
that canceling is its own particular form of staying warm.

The couch already knows my shape–every hollow and every edge pressed in.
It doesn’t hold me to the promises I made or ask me where I’ve been.
No tally of the empty cups, no audit of the burning hours–
the couch already knows my shape, accepts the weight, calls it ours.
No judgment in the give, no lecture in the compromised spring–
the couch already knows my shape. The couch knows everything.

I meant to call her back before she adjusted her expectations of me.
I meant to be the version who follows through on the first three
attempts at contact before the silence becomes its own answer–
instead I watched four episodes of something, a quiet cancer
of productive evenings going nowhere, the plot blessedly simple,
the stakes controlled, the drama nothing the remote can’t ripple
into nothing. Forty-seven minutes at a time, no residue.
The couch and I have an arrangement. Nothing else is due.

The cushion holds the record of my finest failed intentions–
every night I didn’t move, the full collected mentions
of a body that decided rest was better than the reach.
The couch already knows my shape. Still within reach.

The Doll in the Ducts

There’s a doll in the duct above my bed,
she watches me sleep with a cracked-up head.
Her eye’s on a spring and it swings with the breeze,
and sometimes she whispers through the vents with a wheeze.

She knows my dreams, she’s stitched to the wall,
hung by her smile in the hospital crawl.
She giggles at night when I start to pray,
says, “If you break enough, they’ll take you away.”

The doll in the ducts, she sings to the wires,
sewn from regrets and funeral choirs.
She dances in lint, wears gowns of disease,
and stitches my thoughts back crooked with ease.

I asked her once why she never blinks,
she said, “Because blinding truth never shrinks.”
Then she spun in a circle and bit her own hand,
and whispered, “Soon, you’ll understand.”

The nurses pretend she’s not there at all,
but I hear her dragging through every wall.
She tells me jokes made of scissors and skin,
and I laugh till my sanity caves in.

If you see her shadow on the tile,
don’t follow the grin or the crooked smile.
She’ll tell you truths that don’t forgive,
and teach you how the broken live.

Now she crawls in the pipes of my mind,
tugging at memories I tried to bind.
And I smile, I weep, I wheeze with grace,
the duct-doll queen wears my face.

The Dollhouse is Breathing Again

The shutters clack when the wind’s not real.
The dollhouse hums with things that feel.
Tiny furniture, all in place,
but something’s moving in the fireplace.

The wallpaper peels like it’s learned to breathe,
and something beneath the floorboards seethes.
The dolls don’t sit–they stand and wait
with painted hands and twisted fate.

The kitchen’s set for tea and dread,
and the rocking horse shakes like it knows you’re dead.
Every drawer has teeth inside,
and the dollhouse walls have eyes that slide.

Mama Doll hums in lullaby croaks,
stirring soup made from shredded jokes.
Papa Doll stands with a splintered grin,
saying, “Let’s see what the new one brings in.”

The attic door swings back and wide,
with all the lost dolls locked inside.
They whisper names and scratch the beams.
You’ll hear them too, inside your dreams.

The dollhouse is breathing again
with tiny lungs and porcelain skin.
Don’t knock twice or try to pretend.
Once you go in, you stay ’til the end.

It stitched your name on the welcome mat.
So come on in.
And leave like that.

The Dream That Follows
I wake up screaming but I’m still asleep inside the nightmare,
the bedroom walls are breathing and the shadows have developed teeth.
My hands are someone else’s hands doing things I can’t control.
The mirror shows a face that used to be mine
before it learned to split.

I run down corridors that fold back on themselves like intestines.
Every door I open leads to rooms I’ve never seen
but somehow recognize
from memories that aren’t mine or maybe are from lives I haven’t lived yet.
And there’s something following that sounds like my voice calling my name wrong.

This is the terror that lives beneath sleep,
where physics breaks and logic bleeds,
where you’re awake inside the dreaming
and the dreaming won’t release its teeth.
You can’t scream yourself free from this,
can’t wake up when waking is the trick,
just falling deeper into layers
where the nightmare builds its architecture thick.

The thing that wears my mother’s shape keeps asking me to come closer.
Her mouth opens too wide and there’s another mouth inside that one,
speaking in frequencies that make my bones vibrate wrong,
telling me things about myself that I’ve spent years trying to forget.
I’m in my childhood home but all the rooms are wrong.
The kitchen leads to basements that descend forever into wet darkness
where something waits that knows my name from before I had a name.
And it’s been patient it’s been counting down the years until I’d return.

My teeth fall out in handfuls but they keep growing back as something else,
as keys or insects or small accusations that crawl away across the floor.
And everyone I’ve ever loved is here but they’re all slightly wrong,
their eyes don’t blink in sync their smiles extend past where faces should end.
I try to tell them this isn’t real but my tongue has turned to meat
that won’t form words just makes sounds like drowning.
And they all laugh in perfect unison while reaching out to touch me
with fingers that multiply the closer that they get to skin.

This is the terror that lives beneath sleep,
where physics breaks and logic bleeds,
where you’re awake inside the dreaming
and the dreaming won’t release its teeth.
You can’t scream yourself free from this,
can’t wake up when waking is the trick,
just falling deeper into layers
where the nightmare builds its architecture thick.

Then I wake up for real this time or maybe not I can’t be sure,
the bedroom looks correct but something’s off about the morning light.
And I’m afraid to check the mirror afraid of what might check me back,
afraid the nightmare never ended just learned to look like waking life.

The Energy It Takes
They said come out, the room is good, you’ll love it,
said it twice, sent the details, name your price
and they’d meet it. It’s been too long since I’ve been seen.

But the calculus of walking into any room runs:
the parking, the standing, the names I dig up
while landing the handshake, the noise at a volume
that requires leaning in,
the cost I haven’t seen balanced in my social budget
for a while now.

The energy it takes—
you want the honest breakdown, here’s how:
the energy it takes to walk through the door
without counting what I’m spending getting there
runs past what’s available tonight
in the reserves of the willing.
The parking, the performance, the names, the feeling
of being a version of myself
that other people can confirm is real.
The energy it takes is more than what I’ve got
to steal from the rest of this evening.
I ran the numbers. Filed.

I texted quick apologies with just enough
specific detail to pass as true—
said something came up, nothing to derail the night,
said go without me, said next time like I meant it
in the way a man says next time when he’s got
no next times left to spend on getting through the week.
That version confirmed the date out loud.
This version—this couch, this controlled quiet,
the known overhead—
skipped the show and felt almost nothing.
Almost.

They sent the photo from the room.
I liked it without leaving,
absorbed the image in the tomb of my couch
and felt the guilt, which is shorter than the relief
that follows when the choice is made—
the brief duration of remorse
compared to the sustained expansion
of the evening I retained by staying.

They had a good time.
So did I.

The energy it takes.
Different night.
Goodbye.

The Enthusiasm I Used to Have
I signed the form for the thing in the beginning of the year
when the beginning of the year had that particular clear
light on the possible — I went the first time with genuine investment,
went the second time with slightly less, and that was the assessment.

The instructor has my absence noted on the roster with some professionalism;
she hasn’t reached out. I haven’t explained the mechanism.
The seat I used to fill is just the seat that fills with someone punctual,
and the thing I signed up for continues without the additional.

The enthusiasm I used to have for it is somewhere in the building —
just under the surface, under the ceiling
of this specific stretch. I haven’t lost it; I’ve misplaced the access,
somewhere between the second and the third visit.

My friend has been going since we both enrolled on the same evening,
mentioned it with the casual ease of someone who’s not leaving.
The thing she signed up for is the thing she actually does now,
the enthusiasm she had and still has and I had and don’t somehow.

I’ll go back when the going back feels like the natural re-entry,
when the beginning-of-the-year feeling reasserts with genuine sentry.
The enthusiasm I used to have is in the neighborhood somewhere.
The enthusiasm I used to have.

It’s still in there.

The Funny in the Ordinary
is the hardest kind to find—
it requires you to slow down
and to pay a different kind
of attention to the details
of a weekday afternoon,
and find the bit that’s been hiding
in the ordinary room.

The extraordinary is easy.
Anyone can do the disaster.
But the funny in a trip to get your mail?
That territory is vaster,
because everyone has been there,
everyone has felt
the particular indignity
of the ordinary dealt.

I spent a week observing
how I fill a water glass—
the amount of consideration
in the pour and in the past
of pouring water glasses
in my unremarkable life
and found enough material
to cut through ordinary life.

The funny in the ordinary
is the gift of paying attention,
of treating the mundane
with genuine intention:
the way you hold a pen,
the way you check your phone at night,
is funnier than anything
explosive in plain sight.

Because everyone who hears it
says I know exactly that—
the funny in the ordinary,
where the real comedy sat.

The Girl They Forgot to Discharge

Her name’s not on the roster, not scratched into the wall,
but the nurses still make space
for her when making morning calls.
There’s always one plate left untouched,
still warm but never claimed,
and when I asked who it was for, they all forgot her name.

They say the room at the end is sealed,
just storage, just a spare,
but I swear I’ve seen her shadow move
when I’ve passed by unaware.
She doesn’t scream, doesn’t speak,
just hums a song I knew once too,
and every time I try to sleep, she hums the end in tune.

The staff avoid the question now, they look past Room Thirteen,
but I’ve seen her fingers curl around the edges of the screen.
She walks without a sound at night, in hospital socks that slide,
and though no one admits she’s there,
they all leave the closet wide.

She’s the girl they forgot to discharge,
still waiting for someone to sign her card.
She never left, she never cried–
just faded slow while time slipped by.
And now she lives in corners cold,
in rooms too clean, in beds too old.
She’s not a ghost, she’s just a mark
on paperwork left in the dark.

Her gown still hangs in the linen bin, never cleaned or claimed,
and when I asked whose it was, the nurse just whispered, “Shame.”
Some say she wandered too far in sleep and never made it back,
some say she’s just a story they tell to keep the hallways black.

But I’ve seen her in reflections dim, standing just behind,
watching every move I make like she’s measuring the time.
She doesn’t blink, doesn’t breathe,
but somehow still she grieves–
and when she walks,
the floor remembers every day she never leaves.

They changed the locks, they closed the chart,
but they never wiped her from my heart.
And when the lights flicker past four,
I know she’s standing at the door.

So if you wake and hear her hum,
don’t scream, don’t speak, just play dumb.
Because she was me before I cracked–
and I know someday,
she might come back.

The Girl Who Talks to Needles

She waits by the rolling silver tray like it’s a chapel of chrome
and quiet fire,
whispering sweet nothings to each syringe like they’re secrets she’ll never retire.
She names them gently with the reverence of someone who’s bled
for grace,
and she smiles just a little too wide
when one finally recognizes her face.

She cradles the cold glass vials like they might bite if she’s too fast,
and hums an old tune that wraps around your spine
and doesn’t let the moment pass.
She calls one “Mercy,” the other “Faith,
” and lines them up with trembling care,
then leans down close like she’s telling them truths only broken things would dare.

She never waits for nurses to offer their dosage with a practiced hand,
she chooses her poison with the precision of someone who understands.
She favors the long thin needle that trembles
when it touches skin,
and whispers, “This one remembers the nights I didn’t let anything in.”

She’s the girl who talks to needles with her voice so soft
and sweet,
like every syringe holds a lover’s name she can’t wait to repeat.
She doesn’t wince when the metal bites deep through fragile veins,
she closes her eyes and smiles like it’s rain washing out old pain.

She maps her arms like a well-worn script,
each line a chapter bled and gone,
she guides the needle like a brushstroke on a canvas that still breathes
when drawn.
And when it slips beneath her skin like a kiss from someone she used to be,
she sighs and says,
“This is the only thing that still feels like me.”

The staff have tried to slow her down,
to swap her glass for padded calm,
but she just smirks and says,
“Don’t take the thing that taught me to be strong.”
She knows the dosage, knows the pull,
and how to melt just past control,
and she thanks each one with quiet grace
for playing their little role.

She once kissed a blood-wet vial and told it,
“You’ve been the only one who stays,”
then traced her veins like railroad tracks across too many yesterdays.
She doesn’t dream like others do–her sleep is clean and deep,
wrapped in stainless lullabies that sing her wounds to sleep.

The Gratuity of Sanity

The corporate manual grants a single solar arc to mend the fractured bone
To scrub the soot of sixty hours from a heart that turned to stone
I sit in silence while the dishwasher performs its rhythmic metal hum
Counting the frantic minutes until my brain becomes entirely numb
The spreadsheet ghosts are screaming from the corner of the dark kitchen sink
I am allowed these twenty-four hours to pretend I do not have to think
I am a well-oiled cog in a machine that feeds on human sleep and skin
A temporary reprieve from the administrative chapel of our collective sin
The evening arrives with the taste of copper
and the smell of industrial rain
I am preparing the harness to accommodate the familiar
and steady pain
The day of mercy was a joke told by a hangman to a desperate crowd
A temporary silence before the machinery cranks back loud
I lace my boots and check the time while the last hour ticks itself away
I am the property of the company
and this was just a different kind of pay

The Laugh That Leapt

A serrated sound shears through the industrial hum
A vocalized tremor that makes the heavy muscles come undone
It erupted from the throat of a man in a grease-stained coat
A spasm of madness that took the room by the throat
The air is a vector for the madness of the lungs
It travels in the saliva of a thousand wagging tongues
I watched the grin migrate like a fever through the wire
Setting the nervous systems of the factory on fire
The foreman is choking on a mirth he didn’t plan
As the biological friction consumes every man

The contagion is screaming in a chorus of the ribs
Drowning the warnings and the comfortable fibs
It’s a rhythmic eruption of a dark and holy light
Passing like a parasite through the graveyard shift at night
Break the skin of the silence let the sickness overflow
We’re choking on the rubble of the things we used to know

The Laughing Door

There’s a door in the hall that laughs at me,
every time I pass, it wheezes with glee.
No knob, no frame, just painted on,
but something knocks when the lights are gone.

I brought it cookies, I sang a song,
it opened once to prove me wrong.
Inside? Just mirrors and birthday hats,
and a room full of whispering acrobats.

The Laughing Door knows my name,
tells the walls that I’m to blame.
I knock three times, it knocks back four,
hide and seek with the Laughing Door.

My friends all say it isn’t real,
but I’ve seen it giggle and squeal.
One day I’ll walk right through that place,
and wear a clown nose on my face.

The list on my phone
the list goes back to somewhere i cannot locate in the calendar anymore—
it holds the plumber from the pipe thing and the doctor and a floor-
to-ceiling inventory of everything i’ve promised to attend to
since the last time i was the organized kind—the end to
all that started around the time i started saying soon,
which is the list’s primary language, the borrowed afternoon
of intention: the check-up, the email to the guy about the thing,
the thank-you note for something that was kind, the full accounting ring
of everything i’m owed by and owe to and intend to square.

the list knows me better than i do.

it’s got an entry i wrote half-awake
in the nowhere between one and three—
it says “the blr.” for the sake
of whatever i meant that night.
i’ve left it standing like a stone
monument to mystery, something i haven’t disowned
in seven months because deleting the unknown feels wrong,
feels like erasing something that might matter, might belong
to the better version of this list someone finishes some weekend—
a six-am, decisive, fully-reckoned human. message: pending.

this is the catalog of tension
between the person i was going to be by now
and the current version, somehow
still adding three new items every other afternoon
without removing anything.
the list plays the one note of deferred—
the only song it knows.
it grows.

it will take a motivated weekend,
a version of myself with coffee and momentum, extended
across two full days of execution.
i have the list.
the list has me.

the point: don’t miss.

The Man Who Traded Screams for Silence

He used to scream until the walls would bend,
until the pipes shook loose at either end.
Every hallway echoed his voice like fire,
burning through meds, through straps, through wire.

Every nurse knew his name by sound,
every shift braced for the fury unbound.
He didn’t speak–he howled through teeth,
like something caged, like something beneath.

But one day he went still and stared,
no rage, no twitch, no sign he cared.
No meds were changed, no pulse went flat–
he just stopped, and that was that.

He’s the man who traded screams for silence,
not with peace, but with defiance.
Something snapped–he didn’t break–
he just decided not to take.
Now he sits too calm, too cold,
and the silence settles like it’s old.

The chair he’s in hasn’t moved in days,
but the dust won’t touch where his shadow stays.
His eyes still track, but he doesn’t blink,
like he’s watching something we can’t think.

They clean his room but won’t stay long,
say it feels like the echo’s wrong.
Even the walls seem afraid to breathe,
like they know he’s not planning to leave.

His roommate snapped a week ago,
sat in the corner and whispered “No.”
They pulled him out–never said why,
but I heard him sob, “He took the sky.”

No one’s filled that bed since then,
they locked the door and lost the pen.
But I walk past and hold my breath,
because silence hums like second death.

The Map I Drew
I drew the map before I walked the territory through,
marked the points of resistance, the corridors I’d use,
named the gatekeepers by symbol, traced the shortcuts with a line,
and the places where a man could tip the scales into his line.

They don’t teach you this in school, the cartography of want,
how to render what you desire in careful, measurable account,
how to read the space between where you are and where you’re going,
and chart it so precisely that nobody is even knowing.

The map I drew was half prediction, half a burning want,
every route I charted came from something I’d confront.
It’s folded up now, pressed behind my ribs—
every line I traced in pencil, no margins and no fibs.

I put the obstacles in red, my moves in careful blue,
left the unknown regions blank, there’s always something new,
and every time I crossed a checkpoint sketched in advance,
I added to the legend before the next advance.

Some follow other people’s maps and call it guidance,
mistake the borrowed route for their own self-reliance,
but the only map worth trusting in a campaign you’ve chosen
is the one you drew yourself before the ground was frozen.

The territory changed as I moved through it, as it does,
the map revised itself in real time, because that’s what maps must.
But having drawn the first lines gave me language for revision,
and a man with language for the road makes the cleaner decision.

The Mirror Keeps Blinking First

I stood too long at the glass last night,
and the mirror blinked before I did–twice.
It wasn’t a trick of the fluorescent haze,
wasn’t the meds or the sleep-deprived days.

It blinked, and I froze, and it smiled with my teeth,
then mouthed something slow I couldn’t quite read.
I leaned in closer, breath fogging the glass,
and for one full second, it wore my face from the past.

The me from before, the me who could laugh,
the me who didn’t count tiles or split in half.
It waved at me gently, then put its hand down,
and stared with a softness that made me drown.

The mirror keeps blinking first,
like it knows something worse.
It shows me a version I used to be,
then swallows the light when I try to see.

I told the nurse and she checked the frame,
said mirrors don’t blink, said I’m playing a game.
But when she turned her back, it winked at her too–
and her pen hit the floor, though she said it just blew.

Now I cover the glass with a towel at night,
but I still feel it watching beneath the white.
And sometimes at dawn, the towel’s on the floor,
and the mirror’s fogged up with words I can’t ignore.

The Monkey with the Scalpel

He escaped from Lab 13B,
came out humming in F-sharp key.
Tiny lab coat, eyes too wide,
with a scalpel tucked by his monkey side.

He learned to slice from magazines,
and stitched a nurse into her dreams.
Now he roams with a twitch and grin,
climbing vents with tools and sin.

The monkey with the scalpel’s loose again,
wrote “Oops” in blood on Dr. Ken.
He carved a heart in the file room wall,
and giggled when the spine did fall.

He performs lobotomies by feel,
on anyone who dares to squeal.
Taught himself to hum and snip,
while the janitor lost his grip.

They tried a trap with meds and cheese,
he just laughed and cut their knees.
Now he’s chief of “surgery art,”
and he signs his name on every heart.

He draws diagrams in ketchup red,
then sings them while he breaks your head.
If you smell bananas and formaldehyde,
lock your door, or kiss your mind goodbye.

Now he’s got a crew of trained raccoons,
wearing gloves and whistling tunes.
The whole west wing’s his little playground–
the scalpel monkey’s found his ground.

The Morning Paper
I read the morning paper like a man who has no plan,
scanning for the horror and the tragedy and the ban,
and every headline is a setup for a bit I cannot use,
and every column is a punchline wrapped inside the news.

The morning paper used to come on dead wood to the door,
now it arrives on a device and it hurts even more,
because the quantity of awful is endless in scroll,
and the comedy of reading it has taken quite a toll.

The sports section is funnier than anything in print,
grown professionals discussing what a ball could hint,
at regarding some philosophical intention or desire,
while the world outside the stadium is basically on fire.

I clip the funniest headlines like a man preserving art,
a catalog of editorial dignity in part,
and some days the whole front page is just a perfect bit,
and I laugh at the morning paper and I have to admit.

[Chorus]
The morning paper, full of all the things that went to hell,
the morning paper, full of things the headline cannot tell,
and somehow reading every single devastating thing,
makes the morning paper the funniest bit I can bring.

The Morning Wood Special
Woke up hard and she was already awake
and aware of the situation,
her hand sliding under the covers
without a single word,
stroking slow while pretending still to sleep.
I played along, eyes closed, the creep.

Then the rhythm built
and she threw the blanket off,
climbed aboard—
no foreplay, no warm-up,
just mounted like I was stored,
energy she’d been waiting for
since whatever dream she’d had.
She slid down on me
still half-wet
from a dream that went bad.

Grinding before I was fully conscious,
her palms flat on my chest,
the monstrous appetite
of a woman who wakes up hungry
every morning.
Don’t move, she said. This is happening without warning.

She came in under four minutes,
her personal best for the dawn,
then collapsed on my chest,
said good morning,
yawned,
and went to shower
like nothing happened,
like she hadn’t just used me
like a human toy
she keeps beside her bed
for the free.

Release that starts the day right.
I lay there grinning at the ceiling,
covered in her,
reeling
from the efficiency of a woman
who knows what she needs
and takes it every morning.

I make the coffee while she showers.
By the time she’s dressed and done,
she kisses me and says same time tomorrow.
I said, Hon,
this alarm clock you’ve installed
is the only one I’ll never hit snooze on.

She winked and left.
I stood there with my shoes on.

The Mouth of the Crescent

She’s standing in the puddle
where the streetlamp bleeds its yellow light
A fracture in the sidewalk and a splinter in the night
Her jaw is pulled back further than the tendons ought to go
A porcelain disaster in the lamplight’s dying glow
I’m walking through the gravel with a frantic heavy stride
While she drifts behind me like a ghost with nowhere else to hide
The grin is made of ivory and the hunger of the grave
A jagged white obsession that no prayer could ever save
The air is getting thinner as she closes up the space
I can see the wetness of the gums upon that face
I’m fumbling for the door keys with a hand that’s gone to sand
Watching as she reaches out a thin and clawed hand
The smile is all I see now it is filling up the frame
A total occupation of the memory and the name
It’s an anatomical betrayal it’s a rupture of the bone
Leaving me to face the grinning universe alone
The lock is stuck and the darkness is a heavy liquid weight
While the mouth begins to open like a cold and silver gate
I’m screaming at the ceiling but the sound is just a hiss
As I sink into the hollow of that wide and frantic kiss
The grin is the last thing that I’ll ever have to know
Before the industrial shadows finally start to grow

The Music Box Beneath the Floor

It started with a sound too soft to name,
a melody that moved like it knew my shame.
I followed it down past the dresser’s lean,
where the dust holds secrets you’d never clean.

A loose board cried beneath my knees,
and out came air like forgotten pleas.
Beneath it sat a box of rust and gold,
wrapped in lace and air too cold.

I shouldn’t have touched it–but I did with care,
the hinges sighed like they breathed in prayer.
It opened slow like an old regret,
and the tune inside hasn’t stopped yet.

The music box beneath the floor still plays,
a lullaby stitched from quieter days.
It hums the things I tried to hide,
and plays them back on the other side.

The figurine inside is wrong and cracked,
a ballerina bent with her face turned back.
She spins to notes in jagged time,
and bleeds her rhythm into mine.

At night I hear her shift and click,
her limbs unwind in movements sick.
She dances slow beneath the bed,
and sings my thoughts inside my head.

The nurse said there’s nothing there at all,
but I see her shadow on the wall.
And every time I close my eyes–
the box rewinds and the dancer cries.

I tried to burn it once, I swear,
but the fire died in open air.
And now the boards creak out of sync,
like they’re waiting for me to blink.

The Needle Girl

She’s the girl who talks to needles slow,
and every vein is a secret she’ll know.
So if you see her smile too wide–
you’re already inside.

She keeps your breath in tiny jars,
labels them with dates and scars.
And when you’re gone, she doesn’t cry–
she just files your veins and lets you die.

Her closet’s full of ribs and string,
knee bones cleaned and finger rings.
She says she’s building something pure,
a patient made of what we endured.

She’s building a body from what’s left of us,
threading shame through tendons and trust.
We called her sick. We called her kind.
But she’s the god we left behind.

And now we serve, and now we crawl–
she doesn’t need the staff at all.

She’s back again with that silver grin,
sleeves rolled high to show the sin.
No more hiding under beds or rules–
she’s writing scripture with medical tools.

The syringes clink like a lullaby,
filled with things that make you cry.
She taps the air like she taps your thoughts,
and draws you clean in pressure knots.

Her needles never sleep, they twitch in dreams,
dancing through your IV streams.
She hums in dosage, bleeds in code,
and every stitch she sews explodes.
You’ll wake up different.
You’ll wake up hers.

The Nightshirt Left On
You left the nightshirt on—thin cotton holding secrets
where my fingers want their home.
A cheap room breathes warm dust and old perfume,
and still you make it feel like Rome.
Your mouth gives me a crooked vow,
then steals it back,
then dares me not to roam.

I read the curve of you through fabric,
reading bruised desire in a muted tone.
My hands learn patience by necessity,
my pulse stays rude, my face stays stone.
You laugh beneath your breath,
half tender, half threat,
as if longing’s just a loan.

Outside, dark palms sway like jurors,
watching lovers lose their case.
The highway sighs in distance,
and every passing car feels paid
to look away from what we chase.
You ride my knee, slow hazard,
half-dressed confession,
tracing questions down my face.

I memorize what I’m allowed to touch
and mourn in advance each piece of lace.
The overhead fan ticks like a tired clock
that gave up counting hours,
just counting grace.
Your nightshirt shifts,
reveals a collarbone,
and I lose my composure,
lose the race.

I’ve known loud sex that begs for applause,
all thrust and brag and bright disguise.
This is quieter, stranger, sharper—
an afterburn behind your careful eyes.
You turn your shoulder, offer skin in slivers,
rationing the feast with practiced lies.
My name stays out of it, your name stays out of it,
and still the room knows what we prize.

A lipstick ghost on glass,
a hairpin on the sink—
the sort of evidence that never testifies.
Your scent clings to my shirtfront,
stubborn as a grudge,
sweet as a crime that never dies.

When you finally pull me closer,
it isn’t surrender, it’s a choice with teeth and weight.
You show me how to beg
without a sound,
without a face.
Then you stop,
smile wicked,
tug the nightshirt down again,
leaving me wrecked in the calm you place.

You give me the aftermath on purpose,
the warm dent in sheets,
the damp cuff,
the half-smudged makeup face.

Give me traces, not a verdict carved in bone.
Give me proof in creases, heat in tone.
Intimacy that hates explanations,
intimacy that lives on what remains,
then walks out proud,
leaving only trace.

The Nurse Who Smiled Too Wide

She walks without a sound, heels like whispers on tile,
and her clipboard’s always full, but her face wears that smile.
Too wide for warmth, too stiff for grace,
like it’s hiding something just behind her face.

She speaks in rhymes she swears are facts,
wears her name tag pinned to a stitched-up crack.
And when she says, “How are we today?”
you feel your spine begin to fray.

She knows which meds make your mind run slow,
which tray holds truth, which vein will glow.
She hums when she tightens restraints with care,
and tucks your screams in like bedtime prayer.

The nurse who smiled too wide,
with lips like a promise carved in glass,
she’ll stroke your cheek while pulling fast–
and you won’t even know what you let slide,
till you’re choking down calm with her teeth inside.

She brings the pills and makes you beg,
slides the thermometer past the leg.
Says, “Open wide,” like it’s a joke,
then watches to see if you choke.

Her clipboard isn’t for notes you make,
it’s filled with drawings that shift and shake.
I saw one once when her grip went slack–
a figure that bled and blinked right back.

She sings to the ones who stop responding,
keeps her perfume just a little too haunting.
And when they wheel you into sleep,
she leans in close and whispers deep.

She said, “You’re one of the good ones,
love–fragile, cracked, and sweet,”
then traced her nail down both my feet.
And just before I blacked out cold–
her smile slipped–and showed something old.

The Nurse With the Smile Is Missing

She used to glide like whispers on tile,
clipboard in hand, never needing a sword.
Lipstick red like a trigger pulled slow,
and a grin like she knew what you’d never show.

She’d tap your chart like a metronome,
say, “Progress, darling,” in that polished tone.
And when she smiled, it felt too wide–
like something else was tucked inside.

But three days ago, the halls fell still,
no clicking heels, no sugar-pill thrill.
Her meds sat stacked by the desk untouched,
and no one’s dared to move them much.

The nurse with the smile is missing now,
no explanation, no shift, no vow.
She vanished quiet, like a pulled-back breath–
and even the staff won’t guess her death.
But the silence thickens where she stood,
like the ward remembers what it should.

Her office is locked, but someone goes in,
the blinds stay drawn, the light too dim.
And last night, I swear I saw her file–
half open, stained, and grinning vile.

They’ve reassigned her rounds, replaced her key,
but the new girl won’t make eye contact with me.
She trembles when she walks past Room Ten,
the one where the nurse stopped coming in.

I found a note in the laundry cart,
written in red, in looping art.
It said, “They’ll miss me most when you forget–
but darling, I’m not finished yet.”

Now when I sit for my morning pill,
the new nurse flinches if I stay still.
And when I hum the song she taught–
the light above flickers like a thought.

The Orderlies Are Watching Me

They follow me quiet, they follow me loud,
in the wallpaper, in the crowd.
One in the ceiling, one in my bed,
the one in the mirror just nods his head.

They adjust my meds when I try to sleep,
then count my blinks and laugh too deep.
They wink in sync with the hallway lights,
and polish my fears before every night.

The orderlies are watching me–
with smiles too wide and too cavity-free.
They clip my thoughts like clipped ID,
and hum my sins in minor key.

They took my shoelaces, gave me praise,
for not chewing glass the last three days.
One wears cologne that smells like fate,
another took my pulse and called it “late.”

They say I’m “stable,” then lock the door,
while one whispers riddles through the floor.
They nod and jot, but never speak,
except in screams when the hour is bleak.

One has tattoos of all my fears,
another collects my shredded years.
And when they think I’m finally tame,
they’ll brand my soul with a hospital name.

I asked one, “Do you see the clowns?”
He smiled and gently jotted down.
Now every wall has eyes that beam,
and none of this is just a dream.

The Ordinary Weeknight
No occasion and no reason and no candles and no song
Just the kitchen and the cooking and the radio along
You at the counter cutting something green
Me with the dish towel in the most ordinary scene
I’ve ever been part of and the most important one

The love that lives in the nothing-special under the sun
The love that lives in weeknight like it lives in every day
The love that doesn’t wait for special to have something to say

I used to think the love was in the special and the marked
I used to think the love was in the celebrated and the sparked
Event, the anniversary, the birthday, and the grand
But the love is in the weeknight with the dish towel in my hand

The love is in the nothing-special evening in the house
The love is in the conversation that we have and douse
With the ordinary wine from the ordinary store
The love is in the weeknight evening, nothing more

My friends who have the dramatic loves have drama all the time
My friends who need the fireworks need the fireworks and the line
Between the good times and the hard times bright and very clear
My friends who have the drama have the drama every year

I’ll take the weeknight, I’ll take the regular and plain
I’ll take the weeknight after weeknight after weeknight in the rain
Of the ordinary life that we’ve been building here
I’ll take the weeknight as the proof that the love is clear

Life that I’ve been building with you brick by ordinary brick
The ordinary weeknight is the thick of the thick
Of what we are, the whole and the complete and the real
The ordinary weeknight is the best thing I feel

The Other Me
I caught him in the hallway mirror looking back at me,
wearing all my clothes and all my posture perfectly,
but something in the angle of his jawline was not right,
something in the spacing of his pupils in the light.
I blinked and he was synchronized, I raised my hand, he raised his,
I turned my head, he turned it too, his mirroring was flawless,
but when I held completely still for five full seconds flat
he kept on moving half a beat, and I cannot explain past that.

The other me is learning all my habits and my tells,
the other me has memorized the routes and parallels,
he sleeps when I sleep, wakes when I wake, eats and drinks the same,
but he has something in his eyes I cannot put to frame.

I started marking myself, small cuts along the wrist,
so I could track the differences in case I was dismissed,
the other me had all the marks by the following night,
he had done them on the same locations, same depth, same width right.
I told the woman that I see and she listened real well,
she said I had a hard few months, that stress could ring the bell
of perception, then she paused and looked at something past my face,
and I could see her recalibrating to the space.

The other me is learning all my habits and my tells,
the other me has memorized the routes and parallels,
he sleeps when I sleep, wakes when I wake, eats and drinks the same,
but he has something in his eyes I cannot put to frame.

Last week I broke every mirror in the house,
swept them into trash bags, worked through every room alone,
by morning there were mirrors I did not own upon each wall,
and he was standing in them very still, reflected in the hall.
He has gotten better at the lag, I almost cannot detect it,
I almost trust the reflection but I cannot quite respect it,
because twice I watched him smile at a fractionally wrong time,
and something wearing all my features looked back through the rhyme.

The Phantom’s Lair

In the old abandoned theatre, where silence reigns and shadows seethe,
A mind begins to twist and turn, haunted by phantoms that yearn.
Curtains flutter with ghostly grace, whispers echo in the space,
A heart pounds in the chest of dread,
fearing the phantoms of the dead.
Eyes peer from behind the drapes, watching as reality escapes,
Mirrors reflect a haunted past,
where shadows move and nightmares last.
Every corner hides a fear, footsteps draw the terror near,
A mind trapped in this spectral play, sanity slipping day by day.
In the theatre where phantoms dwell, every whisper a tale to tell,
Lost in a world of spectral dread,
haunted by the voices of the dead.
Sanity fades in the haunted air, a soul caught in the phantom’s lair,
A life consumed by unseen fright,
trapped in the theatre’s endless night.
Ghostly hands that reach and pull, dragging the mind into the full,
Eyes that stare with hollow sight,
lost in the depths of endless night.
Whispers call from the empty stage, filling the heart with boundless rage,
A mind that breaks in the phantom’s lair,
lost in a world of haunted despair.

The Prisoner of Principle

He did five years because he would not give up the other men,
He sat there in the hearing room and said it once and then,
He repeated it again with different words but same address,
That he was not the kind who talks to relieve the press.

The prisoner of principle in the visiting room chair,
He could walk out of this building but he does not dare,
Betray the code that cost him more than what was fair,
The prisoner of principle is going to stay right there.

They offered him the deal three separate times with different bows,
Each time the deal got better and each time he said: no, so,
I will serve the sentence and I will walk out clean,
And I will be the man I was when I walked in between.

He did the five and walked back to the neighborhood straight,
Every man who knew him understood the weight,
The prisoner of principle is not always wise or right,
But he is the kind of man who sleeps well in the night.

The Puppet with No Strings

I walked off the show when they cut my wires,
lit a match on the curtain and danced through the fires.
They said, “You need control,” I said, “I need a drink,”
now I’m tied to nothing but the edge and the brink.

No strings, no script, no wooden regret,
just a smirk carved deep where the guilt used to get.
They tried to shelve me like a childhood sin,
but the real show starts when the screams begin.

I’m the puppet with no strings,
singing hymns on broken springs.
I waltz through hell in splintered shoes,
laughing loud with nothing to lose.

I’ve got a falsetto that bleeds like a knife,
and I argue with mirrors about my life.
One of me’s smiling, the other one bites–
we take turns blinking through padded nights.

The ringmaster cries when I won’t comply,
says, “You can’t be free if you never ask why.”
But I tore out my conscience and used it to mop,
now I drink from my guilt like a soda pop.

They keep trying to fix me with duct tape dreams,
but I rewired my mind with candy and screams.
I sing out of tune and blink out of sync–
you blink first, or you drown in the ink.

So staple my limbs to the hospital floor,
I’ll still find a way to crash through the door.
Because I ain’t your toy and I ain’t your freak–
I’m the howl in your throat when you can’t speak.

The Quiet One in Group Therapy

He sits in the circle, back too straight,
name tag blank, eyes like slate.
Doesn’t flinch when the stories spill,
just breathes real slow, then slower still.

We take our turns with trembling shame,
he never speaks. Never says his name.
Just stares through us like he’s not quite real,
like a memory someone forgot to feel.

The counselor coughs and skips his turn,
we all pretend not to crash and burn.
But the lights dim more when he’s around,
and the shadows cling to the floor like sound.

The quiet one in group therapy,
holds his silence like a rosary.
No scars, no files, no sign of pain–
but his stillness hums like acid rain.

I tried to ask him what he sees,
but my voice went cold like winter knees.
He turned his head like a broken hinge,
and smiled the way an old room cringes.

The nurses say they’ve never met
the one in black who doesn’t sweat.
And when they checked the sign-in sheet–
his name was there, but incomplete.

He doesn’t speak, but somehow knows
which of us cries when the hallway glows.
I saw him once in the mirror’s bend–
whispering truths I’ll never mend.

Today he stood when I broke down,
tipped his head like he wore a crown.
And when I looked where he had been–
there was a chair. And dust. And wind.

The Refrigerator Inventory
Eight-fifteen on a weekend. The door hangs open.
The tour begins. What do I have, what can I make—
with the available and the hunger of the steak,
this is the question a man
who hasn’t eaten since the pizza at midnight asks
of the appliance humming its cold liturgy.

The brisket waits, leftover from the midweek fire.
Eggs fill the carton to their twelve-point hunt.
The good cheddar, the half-red onion,
the roasted potatoes cold in their dish—
the cheese drawer holds three varieties:
the aged gouda on the shelf, the cheddar block,
the town’s entire dairy waiting to be spent.
The condiments stand in the door slots down
like soldiers, like promises.

Now the cast iron heats. The diced onion hits first—
that’s the vow, the foundation. Potatoes next,
then the brisket, then eggs cracked to finish,
their liquid gold crowning the hash I’m building
from the light the open refrigerator door lets in,
the morning cool surrounding me as I cook.

I eat at the table, the full skillet,
the hot sauce from the collection and the coffee
going strong from the French press.
The refrigerator’s pull toward something excellent
has once again delivered—
the weekend morning feed I’d considered
since the moment I woke, the inventory led
the way to the best breakfast of the week instead.

By noon I’ve assessed the state again,
the dinner possibilities running through my brain.
The gouda in the drawer speaks grilled cheese.
The eggs suggest frittata, dinner’s pride.
The remaining brisket insists on tacos
if I make the tortilla run.
I make the run.

By sunset the inventory’s been spent,
converted into the best weekend I’ve seen.

The Room Where They Forget You Exist

There’s a hallway they don’t write down on the maps,
where the bulbs hum secrets and the door knobs collapse.
Where the staff walk past like it isn’t even there,
and the cameras blink but never stare.

I found the room when I stopped being loud,
when I stopped asking why, and stopped standing proud.
They wheeled me in and shut the latch,
no name on the door. No file to match.

The lights flicker in sympathy for what I’ve become,
just bones in a chair, too tired to run.
They feed me on silence and pills without names,
and dream me away when the paperwork flames.

This is the room where they forget you exist,
no calls, no clocks, no wrists to twist.
No birthdays, no charts, no family list,
just the hum of the walls and a vanishing mist.

Sometimes I hear a nurse whisper my name,
but it echoes like it’s never the same.
Like I’m someone they made up once and erased,
like a stain on the fabric they couldn’t quite place.

I hum to myself just to prove I’m still real,
mark days in my head like a prayer I can feel.
But even my thoughts are starting to fade,
like crayons left out in the heat they made.

Maybe someday they’ll sweep through and see,
the dust that once whispered, “I used to be me.”
But for now I wait in fluorescent bliss,
in the room
where they forget you exist.

The Screaming Girl Under the Bed Isn’t Me Anymore

She used to scream so loud the plaster cracked,
curled beneath the frame with her knuckles black.
I’d hear her every night around half past three,
clawing at the dark like it owed her a key.

They said she wasn’t real, said I made her up,
said the pills would quiet her, said to drink the cup.
But I felt her breathing underneath my spine,
and her screams were louder every single time.

The screaming girl under the bed isn’t me anymore,
she’s quieter now, but she’s closer to the door.
She doesn’t howl, she doesn’t shake–
she just watches with a smile I can’t mistake.

I stopped fighting her around the second year,
started humming back the songs she’d whisper near.
We made a deal in silence, sealed in dark–
she keeps my nightmares, I keep her spark.

Now the nurses say I’m better, say I’m calm,
but they don’t see the handprint on my palm.
They don’t hear the lullaby she sings at four,
the screaming girl isn’t screaming anymore.

So if you check beneath the bed tonight,
and find it empty in the fading light–
don’t feel relieved, don’t close the door,
because the screaming girl isn’t down there anymore.
She’s standing right behind you now,
wearing my face with a quiet vow.

The Smiling Man in the Intercom

The intercom buzzes when no one calls,
at hours too thin to exist at all.
Just hiss at first, then something worse–
a voice too calm, too sweetly rehearsed.

He doesn’t ask for help or send a nurse,
just says my name like it’s a curse.
Then laughs like a wire pulled too tight,
and whispers things I told no one at night.

The button’s red, but never pressed,
yet his voice still cuts through my chest.
He says, “You lied today about the meds,”
then hums a song inside my head.

The smiling man in the intercom line,
knows my sins and feeds on mine.
He speaks in codes and distant clicks,
and calls me by names that never stick.

I once unplugged it at the wall,
but still he spoke–soft, and small.
He said, “You think I live in there?”
Then laughed, and breathed behind my chair.

I tried to record him, catch the sound,
but the tape just hissed and spiraled down.
And when I played it back that night,
my voice repeated, “You’re not right.”

He once recited my mother’s name,
then told me where she hid the shame.
And when I asked him who he was–
he said, “I’m the echo of what you caused.”

Now the intercom breathes when I think too loud,
and repeats my thoughts like a thundercloud.
I speak no more. I mouth, I mime–
but he still answers every time.

The Snooze Button Manifesto
Nine minutes — the interval I’ve certified as sacred territory,
the catechism the morning hasn’t yet stripped from my hands.

The alarm fires its grievance at the hour I set in bad faith,
and I trade another round of nine
for one more brief postponement of the day.

Four rounds in and the mathematics have turned against me considerably.
The clock says something inconvenient about the hour I’m choosing not to see.

I’ve bought myself a half-hour out of the requirements,
out of the waking terror —
four snoozes deep and every nine more minutes
is a richer, warmer error.

Nine minutes, hit the snooze.
The only sacrament I practice.
Nine minutes, hit the snooze.
The smallest and most attractive fragment of unconsciousness
still available to me this morning.

Seven forty-seven is a credible departure.
People get their whole machinery running from a later charter.

The day does not begin at six.
The day begins at whatever
the man who is committed to the living says,
and that is whenever.

Nine minutes, hit it one more time — the fifth and counting clearly.
The math has gone from discipline to comedy, but really:
the ceiling has no deadline
and the pillow has no grievance,
and the nine-minute gospel stays between me and the early.

Nine minutes, hit the snooze.
The only sacrament I practice.
Nine minutes, hit the snooze.
The smallest and most attractive fragment of unconsciousness
still available to me this morning.
Nine minutes, hit the snooze.
The brief reprieve before the warning.

The Sovereignty of the Scorn

I occupy a throne carved from the cold geometry of my own logic
while the world outside is a messy soup of unrefined impulses
I am the architect of the high wall and the heavy gate
observing the common friction from a distance that feels like a clean blade
you think you can inhabit the rooms of my intellect with your soft hands
but my inner critic is a king who refuses to grant you the keys
he sits in the dark center of the brain
and mocks the way you breathe
he finds the flaw in the curve of your hip
and the stain on the silk
I am a prisoner of my own excellence
measuring the vacuum
where a heart used to beat with a silver ruler
I watch you move in the dim light of the hallway
a collection of heat and blood that doesn’t fit the blueprint
the dawn is a gray threat creeping over the lip of the horizon
bringing the noise of the striving back to the center of the bone
I lie beside you and feel the distance like a canyon of dry ice
you are a masterpiece of biology and a footnote I refuse to read
but I am the only one who can see the jagged reality behind the seams
the clock is a heartbeat that belongs to a man who will never rot
I find a strange and jagged comfort in the refusal to be moved
let the weather do its worst and the calendar go blank
I am the only one left to tell the story that I have already sold to myself
the end is not a peace but a permanent sharpening of the gaze
the throne is made of iron
and the king has no intention of leaving
I am the vacancy that will eventually swallow the whole goddamn city
the light is a luxury I can no longer afford to see.

The Sweet Ache

In the grip of self-imposed restraint,
I trace the contours of a saint turned quaint.
Edging on the precipice, but never leap,
savoring the climb, steep so steep.
Feral whispers in the crawl of night,
I pant, I beg, in the mirror’s sight.

Hours like centuries stretch under my skin,
a marathon of desire, a symphony of sin.
Each touch a tease, each withdrawal a scream,
caught in the web of this relentless dream.
To break is to lose, to hold is to win,
in the act of delay, I wear my discipline.

I don’t seek the peak, I crave the climb,
in the pit of longing, I bide my time.
The sweeter the ache, the deeper I go,
in this torturous heaven, this exquisite hell below.
Let me suffer for pleasure, let the pain be my guide,
in the purgatory of lust, I willingly reside.

Touch and go, a dance with my reflection,
each move calculated for maximum affection.
On the edge of sanity, on the brink of the fall,
in the chaos of waiting, I find my all.

So I pause, I halt, right before the break,
every moment withheld for its own sweet sake.
In this delay, in this exquisite ache,
I find the truth in the front I fake.

The Teeth’s Prayer

Underneath my pillow, a secret laid bare,
sharp and unfamiliar, a set too strange to wear.
Each night they assemble, an eerie serenade,
chattering in darkness, a macabre masquerade.

They hummed a tune of shadows, a chant of ancient lore,
I traced each sound in silence, deciphering the score.
A litany so breathless, a prayer without a plea,
spoken in the whispers of teeth not meant for me.

In the dead of night, I recite the sacred verse,
mouth bleeding rites, under the curse.
Each syllable a summon, each pause a deeper call,
in the mirror of the night, where shadows enthrall.

The alignment came with agony, as my mouth began to spread,
teeth multiplying eagerly, where fear and longing wed.
No need for my reflection, no need for worldly views,
just an endless appetite, and a mouth to feed the muse.

Tonight, I speak the toothsome spell, the incantation deep,
my gums surrender willingly, as into dark I leap.
More teeth to join the chorus, more whispers to obey,
in the ritual of possession, where I willingly decay.

So smile into the void, where new fangs find their faith,
in the ritual of the night, we find our spectral wraith.
More teeth, more prayers, in darkness they weave,
I am the keeper of the chant, in the teeth I believe.

The Therapist Keeps Nodding

He leans back slow with his pen on pause,
nods like a saint while ignoring my flaws.
I say “I’m drowning,” he says “Go on,”
while sketching my corpse with a perfect yawn.

His glasses flash like a signal flare,
but there’s nothing but fog and recycled air.
He scribbles loops on his little chart,
probably mapping the weight of my heart.

The therapist keeps nodding, head on repeat,
like he’s counting the cracks in the soles of my feet.
He smiles when I scream, then circles a name–
but it’s not mine, and it’s not sane.

He asked me once what color I bleed,
then underlined “delusional need.”
His clock ticks loud like a funeral dirge,
and his pulse syncs up when my thoughts surge.

The couch sags deeper every week,
swallowing words I forget to speak.
He said, “Progress is a slow decay,”
and marked my soul as halfway gray.

I flipped the table once, just to see,
if he’d react to the unhinged me.
He said, “This is good. This means you feel.”
Then offered a mint with a fucking seal.

Now I speak in riddles just for spite,
he still nods like I’m his delight.
But I saw his file when the lights went black–
it said “Too late. No coming back.”

The Unanswered Text
Two gray marks. That cruel underline—
proof I existed in your periphery,
that you chose the nothing.
My words hung there,
confirmation of my own dismissal.

The screen stayed dark.
Silence is a blade that cuts without lifting a hand,
the kind of wound that doesn’t bleed
but throbs deep under the ribs
where pride pretends to live.

I replayed what I wrote—too raw, too honest, too eager—
humiliation coiled through me,
a slow tightening,
like fingers hooking into the soft part of my throat.

The phone lit up again, not with you.
Some app clawing for attention.
My jaw twisted at the irony.

I kept scrolling through your thread,
every message a fossil from someone I barely recognized—
me, softened, wide-open,
unguarded in ways I swore I’d never be again.

Your silence wasn’t absence, it was a choice,
and that truth barked through my chest
like a dog chained too long.

I told myself: one hour, then I let it go.
But hours passed and I was still anchored to that screen,
still checking for the ellipsis,
still composing something, anything,
even a lie dressed up as kindness.

The shame curled hot beneath my skin
because I knew, really knew,
that my dignity had packed a bag
the moment I sent the third unanswered message.

And yet I sat there, marinating in it,
because wanting is a sickness
and I hadn’t found the antidote,
hadn’t found the exit.

Expectation is its own addiction.

I tried to distract myself—
music, cold water, pacing the apartment like a wild thing—
but every damn minute circled back
to that single truth: you saw me,
and still wanted nothing.

Night stretched long and wire-thin,
my thoughts looping like faulty film,
replaying the moment your attention
faltered and never returned.

By the time the sun rose,
I felt hollowed out,
scraped clean by the knowledge
that closure would not arrive
wrapped in your voice,
your apology,
your anything.

I whispered a curse into the morning air,
not at you but at the piece of me
still kneeling in front of a screen,
begging for a flicker of connection.

And when I finally deleted the thread,
my thumb trembled—
not from loss,
but from the furious relief
of ending a vigil
that only humiliated me more.

The Voicemail I Cannot Delete
Twelve seconds. That’s all.
Twelve seconds of a throat clearing first,
then the words—hey, call me back, I need to talk—
the rehearsed unrehearsed of it,
the way men speak when they’re about to say
something too large for the mouth,
something the throat cannot carry
and the machine will only flatten.

I never called him back.
I watched the notification glow,
thought tomorrow, thought later,
thought the things we think
when we don’t yet know
that time is not a bank, that it is a wick,
that what he needed wasn’t waiting.

He died the next day.
Alone.

And now the phone company sends their notice—
storage full, delete or upgrade.
I upgraded. Paid the fee.
Because this voicemail is the cage
where I keep his voice alive,
the twelve-second terrarium
where a dead man still has lungs,
still has breath, still has
the gravel and the warmth,
the familiar hum of someone breathing close.

Four hundred times I’ve played it
into the dark of this bedroom.
Four hundred times I’ve listened
for what lived beneath the words—
was he scared, was he in pain,
was this the leaning edge of goodbye
and I just didn’t recognize it
because I didn’t pick up the phone,
didn’t call him back,
didn’t save him with twelve seconds
I will never get back,
not in any bank,
not in any life
where time refunds its wick.

I pay whatever they ask.
I’ll keep paying.
Because the month runs out
and the server erases
and I cannot let those seconds go quiet,
cannot let his voice stop
being the last place on earth
where he still has breath,
still has courage,
still has the thing
he couldn’t say to me
only to a machine
that didn’t know a man was about to die.

The Walls Changed Color When She Left

She didn’t scream when they wheeled her out,
didn’t look back, didn’t whisper doubt.
But the air shifted sideways as the door clicked closed,
and the color drained from the walls like it knew what it chose.

Her room had been warm, like old decay,
with handprints smudged in childish gray.
But the moment her silhouette was gone from the light,
the corners faded into permanent night.

The peach turned pale, the lilac grayed,
and every surface warped the way memory fades.
It wasn’t repainted. No brush, no tool–
just the paint itself, shedding like it broke a rule.

The walls changed color when she left,
like they exhaled sorrow, then held their breath.
She didn’t cry, but the ceiling did–
and something old peeled back and hid.

No one speaks her name on rounds,
but the nurses walk softer on that ground.
They open the door but don’t step through,
and the new girl inside keeps asking who.

She drew on the walls in ink and spit,
with broken crayons and half-truths lit.
And now the paint forms shapes at night,
like it’s trying to rebuild her bite.

I watched a nurse press her hand to the wall,
and pull back shaking, like it knew it all.
Said the paint felt wrong–“Like skin too thin,”
and the silence cracked with a breath from within.

I sit in her room now, sleep in her bed,
but her lullabies whisper inside my head.
And when I close my eyes just right–
the walls begin to glow with spite.

The Wedding Speech I Gave in My Head
I gave a wedding speech once — her best friend’s —
prepared for two weeks, cut it down to three minutes,
delivered the edited portrait at the reception
while the whole real speech stayed in my head.
The whole real speech was about her, not the couple —
or about her as evidence of what love can be —
I couldn’t give the whole real speech in public
so I gave the acceptable one and kept the true one.

She sat at the table looking up at me
while I gave the speech I’d prepared for company —
and she knew, the way she always knows,
that the speech she was hearing wasn’t all of it.
After, when we were driving, she asked:
what were you actually going to say up there?
And I told her, badly, without notes or preparation —
the speech I’d been editing for two weeks in reverse.

What I told her, badly, was this:
watching you love people is an education.
You love without the hedge, without the exit strategy,
without one foot already out the door.
You go all the way in every time,
and when it costs you something you don’t call it a loss —
you call it what it is, which is the price of being someone
who takes the love seriously enough to risk it.

She listened in the car while I reconstructed it —
the speech that didn’t make the reception,
the speech I’d been too careful to deliver publicly —
and she was quiet for a minute when I finished.
Then she said: I show up because you make it worth showing up for.
And I had to take the car off the highway for a minute,
find a spot, sit with what she’d just said —
which was her doing the thing the speech was about, right on cue.

The couple whose wedding it was are still together —
I’ve seen them since, they seem like it’s working.
Whatever speech I gave them at the reception,
whatever three-minute speech I’d prepared —
I hope it helped a little, hope it said something useful.
But the speech I kept was mine, for her, internal,
and I finally gave it badly in a car one evening,
and she gave it right back, as she does, in one line.

The Weekend I Didn’t Leave the House
The first night I convinced myself the door was a deferred decision—
I’d go out when the precision of wanting something external came back online,
when the gap between the interior and the blueprint
of a normal weekend closed itself from the inside out.
The gap did not close. I fell asleep without
Saturday materializing into anything intended.

Sunday arrived with its own particular suspended
animation—the day that arrives already at the end
of itself, the light already long before it bends
into evening, the hours already retrospective at noon.
I spent it horizontal. Didn’t leave.

This cocoon I’ve built around two days was not what I’d have called a plan
so much as the outcome of a particular kind of man
in a particular kind of week saying hold, not yet,
not this weekend, let me have the quiet, let me get
back to the level where the outside world costs what it should
instead of what it costs right now.
I understood.

The shelf of the usual cleared of obligation,
cleared of the debt of presence.
The lamp stayed on. I’m not upset.
The weekend I didn’t leave the house. I’m good.
I needed it. I’d do it again. I would.

By the last hour I could feel the world still moving past the wall—
the muffled, distant, peripheral hum of the overall
continuation of things I wasn’t part of, the low-grade note
of life outside the window—noted it. Took note.
Didn’t open the door to it. Not yet. Not tonight.

Still here. Recalibrated. Ready for the week.
I’ll speak.

The Word Unwritten

In the quiet of my room, the ink flows like a curse,
scripting shadows on the walls, in the universe reversed.
Each letter carved upon the air, a sigil of my fate,
trapped within a looping scrawl that I grow to hate.

They move with minds all their own,
these traitors at the end of my wrists,
dragging black across white, a storm of swirls and mists.
The word, it haunts my every line, an obsession I can’t escape,
etched deep within my flesh, a formless, ghostly shape.

Nailed down, I try to still their quake,
silence the spell they incessantly make.
One spike each to hold them fast,
in the wood, under skin, make this moment the last.
But still, they twitch, they bleed, they sign,
that cursed word, a madness divine.

I didn’t choose the ink or the endless, whispered chants,
I bolted them to silence, denied them their dance.
Yet in the pooling darkness, where the cold iron bites,
the word forms in silence, igniting the nights.

Now I watch in horror as the crimson letters merge,
a tale of something ancient, an existential urge.
To know may be the ending, the truth beneath the skin,
but ignorance is torture, a fight I’ll never win.

So here I lie, bound by my own hand,
a prisoner to the word I can’t understand.
In the silence of my agony, in the echoes of my plea,
the word is all that remains of me.

They Changed My Room While I Slept

I woke up to silence, but it wasn’t the same kind as before,
the air felt too clean, and the light bent away from the floor.
My blanket had edges it never had before last night,
and the ceiling stared back like it had something to write.

My pillow was softer, but it smelled like her skin,
and the bed was an inch too far from where it had been.
I reached for the wall and the texture was new–
like they’d painted it while I was sleeping through.

The crack in the mirror had vanished clean,
replaced by a shimmer that didn’t feel keen.
And my shadow moved just a moment too late,
trailing behind me like it had gained weight.

They changed my room while I slept,
shifted the silence, rewired what’s kept.
Now everything looks like it’s always been mine–
but nothing inside me feels aligned.

The vent now clicks when I start to cry,
and the doorknob hums with a lullaby.
The corner chair where I used to hide–
is now turned just enough to watch from the side.

Even the clock ticks different now,
like it knows how long they’ve been allowed.
The drawer has no lock, but won’t pull free–
and I swear it breathes when no one can see.

The nurse said nothing’s changed at all,
but she blinked too long when I asked the wall.
And later that night when the lights went red,
the new room laughed inside my head.

Now I sleep with one eye open wide,
staring at walls that shift with pride.
And when they ask how rest has been–
I smile and say, “This room has teeth again.”

They Found a Tooth in the Vent

It started with a rattle behind the grate,
a clicking rhythm that didn’t quite wait.
Maintenance said it was just old dust,
but we all smelled rust, sweat, and trust.

Then the nurse pulled back the metal plate,
and something fell with a sound like fate.
Not a screw. Not a bolt. Not a bone by guess–
just a human molar, stained and a mess.

We all stared too long, too still,
as if the vent might open and spill.
And when they reached in with shaking hands,
they hit something soft that didn’t withstand.

They found a tooth in the vent, and nothing’s clean,
no scrub can erase what’s been unseen.
You can patch the grate, but the breath still stinks–
of skin and silence and something that thinks.
It’s not gone.
It just shrinks.

Next day, someone scratched the wall,
“Look inside,” in letters small.
And when the nurse checked the filter slot,
she pulled out hair tied in a knot.

Someone’s files went missing next,
Patient Twelve, room notes untext.
No discharge. No transfer. Just gone–
but her breath still fogs the lights at dawn.

I heard a whisper when I tried to sleep,
through the slats where secrets creep.
It said, “I fed the dark with everything I meant–
and I left my truth in the vent.”

Now they clean less often near that wall,
and the hallway dims before nightfall.
And every shift, someone new goes pale,
when the grate starts to rattle like a nail.

Ticking Mirrors

In the glass, I trace lines that deepen,
counting wrinkles, fears that steepen.
Gray hairs fall like leaves in rot,
my youth decays, but I forgot.

Ticking behind my eyes, a clock so cruel,
every second whispers, “fool.”
I fight the sag, the soften, the fade,
in the mirror’s light, I’m afraid.

Joints ache with every move I make,
each morning’s a reminder of what’s at stake.
Moisturize to combat each crease and line,
denying time with every sign.

Birthdays pass with tears that fall,
each one louder, a somber call.
I’m not just aging; I’m turning blind,
to the life I leave behind.

Fear of aging, a silent ghost,
haunts me more than most.
As mornings come and shadows stretch,
I’m clinging to the youth I reach.

Too Much Is Never Enough 2
There was a hole where my conscience should’ve lived.
I filled it with everything I couldn’t fit inside a dream.

My father said the meek inherit. I said let them have it.
I’ll take the earth and leave the meek to manage.

Boardrooms thick with handshakes, promises like tissue paper —
I collected debts from men who’d thank me for the knife.
Stacked the chips so high the dealer couldn’t see my face.
Called it ambition. Hustle. Winning the race.

The finish line kept moving.
The hunger never quit.
The more I swallowed, the more the emptiness
bulged at the seams.

She said I’d lost my mind somewhere between
the third and fourth million.
I told her that’s the price of having vision.

She packed her suitcase with all the years I was never present.
Left a note that said I hope the portfolio’s pleasant.
I read it once, then watched the tickers climb,
then read it once again.
Filed it somewhere between regret and dividend.

The lawyers split everything clean down to the bone.
I won the house. Lost the only warmth that ever lived there.

And winter moved into every room I owned —
the kind of cold that money purchases
is the kind that never thaws.

I bought the mountain and I’m digging for what’s underneath.
The richest man in every room still dying on his feet.

They read the will in a room full of people
who learned my name the year I hit my first seven figures.
Every wing of every hospital, every charity foundation —
all named after a man who wouldn’t cross the street for you.

I gave away more than most men ever see
just to prove that losing it meant nothing to me.

And that’s the cruelest joke the devil ever wrote:
you can’t take it with you —
but it takes you when you go.

I bought the mountain, found a deeper hole beneath.
Carved my name in gold above a borrowed heartbeat.
Too much — was never — enough.

Trust Shadows

Behind every smile, a secret lurks,
in every handshake, the shadow works.
I read between lines that they never say,
watching for signs they’ll betray me today.
Sleep with one eye open, on the edge of night,
each whispered word a blade, poised to strike.

Trust no one, their motives always hidden,
in smiles that lie, and eyes that keep secrets forbidden.
I’m counting their words, keeping the score,
in this shadow play, trust is war.

Silence is a canvas, painting fears in my mind,
their quiet is a message, what are they trying to hide?
I sift through their silence, searching for a clue,
every pause a confession, revealing what’s true.
I’ve got files of conversations, a library of deceit,
prepared for the moment, I uncover their conceit.

Paranoia’s grip, tight and suffocating,
in a fortress of doubt, perpetually waiting.
Isolation my shield, suspicion my sword,
guarding against the betrayal I can’t afford.

Betrayal’s not an “if,” it’s a resonant “when,”
in the theater of trust, everyone pretends.
So I watch and I wait, with my back to the wall,
in the kingdom of the paranoid, I rule over all.

Truth in the Shadows

I’ve walked through shadows where others fear to tread,
a heart so cold, eyes vacant, empathy dead.
I’ve taken what I’ve wanted, never a second guess,
witnessed their suffering, felt nothing inside this chest.

They scream, they plead, their pain a silent song to me,
I’m detached, a spectator to their agony.
No tremble in my hands, no quiver in my voice,
in the chaos of their despair, I see no choice.

I’m not cruel, I’m just clear, in a world that’s veiled in fear,
they call it heartless, I call it seeing without smear.
I don’t feel evil, I feel bare, stripped of the fronts they wear,
honest to the bone, in a world that’s never fair.

Call me a monster, or a fiend, but I’m the truest you’ve seen,
in a world full of masks, my face remains serene.
They judge what they don’t understand, label it a sinister hand,
but I am just the mirror, showing the truth they can’t stand.

I’ve broken more than laws, shattered lives, stolen scenes,
in the quiet aftermath, I’m left with serene greens.
No guilt to stain, no conscience to fight,
I sleep in the void, untroubled by the night.

So here I stand, unflinching and unswayed,
in the clear light of truth, where others just evade.
Don’t weep for me, save your tears instead,
for the lies you live by, the truths you dread.

Tunnels of Panic

It builds like pressure, deep within the cage of my chest,
a balloon swelling wild, leaving no room to rest.
My fingertips tingle, a cold creeping dread,
as the world starts to blur, thorns bloom in my head.

My scalp’s electric, buzzes sharp and deep,
while I tear at my skin, desperate to unbind.
The walls start to narrow, reality bends and twists,
I’m shouting for help, in the void where it’s missed.

In my chest, there’s a storm, in my breath, there’s a fight,
panic’s grip turns the day far too quickly to night.
I’m lost in the tunnels where my fears collide,
screaming into the spiral of a relentless tide.

The world tips sideways, on this terrifying ride,
every beat of my heart, a lash that I can’t hide.
Is this dying? Or just another false alarm?
In the silence of my mind, where each thought does harm.

So hear my voice, catch the echo of my plight,
understand this chaos that haunts me through the night.
Don’t dismiss, don’t ignore, this is real as the pain,
in the grip of my panic, where I’m left once again.

Two A.M. Refrigerator
The house goes dark, the family’s asleep,
I’m standing in the kitchen at two,
the refrigerator hums its old familiar nothing,
every instinct says this is wrong,
but the light comes on and the cold air hits my face,
and suddenly this kitchen feels like something holy—
leftover ribs from the cookout yesterday,
the mac and cheese my wife said put away.

I’m eating standing up, right from the pan,
not even heating it, just eating like a man,
a man who’s lost the thread of what he’s doing here,
a man who scraped the bottom of the chips and beer,
the cold spaghetti tastes like something close to grace,
I’m eating in the dark with the light across my face,
I promised I’d do better, promised I’d be good,
I’m breaking every promise like I knew I would.

There’s a rotisserie chicken I forgot about,
I’m pulling it apart, pulling every piece out,
the drumstick first and then the thigh and breast,
I’m not even hungry now but I can’t rest,
it’s something else I’m filling, something deeper down,
the day was hard and wore me to the ground,
and food is the one comfort that delivers fast,
the only feeling I can make reliably last.

I find the pie my mother-in-law left behind,
two pieces gone and now I’m pulling at the rind,
the whole remaining pie has gone into my hands,
standing at the counter making smaller plans,
plans that start with morning, plans to do it right—
I’ll make them in the daylight, not at two at night,
right now I’m just a man and a refrigerator light,
and everything I’m eating helps me feel alright.

The dog found me at some point, he approves,
he’s the only witness to my midnight moves,
I slip him a piece of something, seal our pact,
two creatures in the kitchen, that’s a fact,
the fridge door closes and the room goes dark again,
I shuffle back to bed, I’ll sleep till ten,
tomorrow I’ll be better, swear I will,
but tonight the refrigerator had its fill.

(Genre Pop-country)
Two Left Feet

The honky-tonk band cranked its twang, rhythm pounding through the planks,
and I stood frozen there, terrified to move,
my boots rooted like I’d grown roots,
everyone else spinning past in some effortless country blur
while I remained a statue carved from pure panic.

He crossed the floor before I could bolt,
his smile cracking the whole thing open—
took my hand and I laughed, the nervous kind,
the kind that says I’m terrified and thrilled and yours.

His palm was warm. Steady. Mine wasn’t.
We stepped and stumbled, tangled and fell apart,
laughed so hard the words blurred,
forgot the steps, forgot everyone watching,
forgot to be anything but here.

The music wrapped us in its lazy, golden spin,
and I stopped counting the missteps,
stopped cataloging the fumbles,
just let his grip pull me through another turn.

Two left feet, the whole room probably knew.
Two left feet, and I’d never felt less like running.
Two left feet, finding their own crooked rhythm,
swaying in the amber light with a boy who never asked me to be graceful.

Just to be his.

Under Your Sky

In the shadow of titans, where I find my thrill,
dreams of giants that can bend me to their will.
Crushed beneath the weight of an immense caress,
in their mighty grip, I find my true regress.
Towering figures in the landscape of my mind,
a fantasy of scale, impossible to find.
Under colossal heels, a fragile, fleeting breath,
I yearn for the crush, the sweet weight of death.

I want to be small, beneath your endless sky,
under your gaze, where I can’t hide or lie.
Swallowed in your shadow, where I’m meant to be,
in your vastness, I find my liberty.

Imagining a world where I’m the lesser part,
dominated wholly, a minuscule upstart.
Giantesses ruling with a gentle, stern command,
overshadowing me, I yield to their demand.
Pinned by giant fingers, trapped in their palm,
the comfort in being tiny, a paradoxical balm.
It’s not just the size, it’s the power they wield,
in their overwhelming presence, my spirit is healed.

Massive and majestic, they stride across my dreams,
in their world, nothing is as it seems.
Power so pure, a force so raw,
in their awesome might, I dissolve without flaw.

So let me vanish in your vast dominion,
under your feet, a willing minion.
For in your grandeur, I am free,
in your colossal world, I cease to be.

Vanishing Point (2)

In the silence of my own skin, I conjure a retreat,
where my body folds, a quiet so complete.
A surreal feast, where flesh consumes itself,
lips upon lips, like books pulled from the shelf.
This self-devouring vision, grotesquely serene,
in the swallowing, I find a space so clean.

No horror here, in the closure of form,
only the peace of a self-made storm.
Lips devouring each other in a slow hold,
seeking nothingness, finding a trace
of a world where my shame has no place to stand,
in this imagined void, I command.

Vanishing point, where I fold and fade,
inward I turn, the world’s noise unmade.
A blank space emerges where pain once thrived,
in the silence of not being, I’m strangely revived.
Here in the depths of an inward hell,
I find a heaven where I can dwell.

Imagine the calm of a landscape so bare,
nothing left to take, nothing left to wear.
A self-consumption that cleanses the past,
eradicating shadows my form has cast.

So let me fold, let me quietly go,
into the fold, where I’m no longer for show.
A blank space, serene, where my fears cease to chase,
in the quiet self-consumption, I find my truest place.

Vanishing Point (3)

Eyes wide in the dimming light,
fading visions, losing sight.
The world a blur, where nothing’s right,
at the vanishing point, out of the fight.

Voices drown in the growing din,
can’t tell where you end and I begin.
A losing battle I’ll never win,
at the vanishing point, where fears spin.

Hold me back from the edge, so steep,
where the drop is dark, and the fall is deep.
Save me now, I’m in too deep,
at the vanishing point, where nightmares creep.

Vanishing Point

Eyes wide in the dimming light,
fading visions, losing sight.
The world a blur, where nothing’s right,
at the vanishing point, out of the fight.

Voices drown in the growing din,
can’t tell where you end and I begin.
A losing battle I’ll never win,
at the vanishing point, where fears spin.

Hold me back from the edge, so steep,
where the drop is dark, and the fall is deep.
Save me now, I’m in too deep,
at the vanishing point, where nightmares creep.