Rotmouth

Above the Underneath

I wait where the nerves twitch, where your breath skips,
taste your pulse when you lie and say you’re fine.
You dress me in excuses, lock the door and hope,
but I’ve lived in your marrow longer than hope.

You keep your face blank, but your dreams betray.
Every scream you swallow just sharpens my blade.
I am the hunger under your calm,
the itch in your smile, the tremor in your palm.

You can run, you can act, but you know I’m awake.
I feed on your panic, on every mistake.
You fill your days with rules, try to keep me chained,
but I slip through the cracks. I love your pain.

I listen to your heartbeat, thick and slow,
count every lie you pretend I don’t know.
You hand me the wheel when the edge feels near.
I steer you to chaos and feed on the fear.

You ache for release but you’ll never confess.
You want to be saved but you settle for less.
You try to be gentle, try to forget,
but I love you best when you’re drowning in sweat.

You’re never alone, never just you—
I am the shadow that you can’t undo.
I’ve got claws, I’ve got keys—
I live for the night when you let me free.

One day you’ll stop fighting, you’ll turn out the light.
Let me wear your face, let me take what’s mine.
I am the ache, I am the scream,
the truth in your blood, the end of your dream.

You built this cage, you forged this chain,
but I am the lock, and I know your shame.

In the end, you are nothing but me.
No mask, no hope, just the dark and the teeth.
I am the hunger.
I am underneath.
I’ve got claws.
And I’ve got you.

All Mad Here

The walls are too close, breathing down my neck with a heat that tastes like metal,
each step echoes in this twisted maze, where the floor shifts beneath my feet like it’s got something to say,
but I can’t hear it over the blood rushing in my ears, pounding out a rhythm I can’t follow,
because nothing makes sense here, not the walls, not the ceiling that sweats shadows,
not the doors that lead to nowhere, and the ones that don’t are worse,
opening into rooms that smell like old screams and broken promises,
where the mirrors don’t show your reflection, just the things you tried to forget.

I’ve been here before, or maybe I haven’t,
because time isn’t a straight line in this place,
it curls in on itself like a snake swallowing its own tail,
and I’m stuck in its gut, waiting to be digested into something unrecognizable,
something that doesn’t remember how it got here,
only that the walls keep breathing and the floor keeps moving,
and every turn feels like deja vu wearing a different mask.

We’re all mad here.

The lights flicker like they’re laughing at me,
casting shadows that stretch too long,
twisting into shapes that look like hands reaching for my throat,
but when I turn around, there’s nothing there,
just the sound of my own thoughts scraping against the inside of my skull,
whispering that maybe I belong here,
maybe I’ve always belonged here,
in this maze that feeds on fear and spits out madness.

I claw at the walls,
but they bleed when I touch them,
thick, black ichor oozing from cracks that weren’t there a second ago,
seeping into my skin like it’s trying to pull me inside out,
turn me into one of the shadows that slither just out of sight,
laughing without mouths,
watching without eyes.

The floor tilts,
throwing me into a pit that wasn’t there before,
but I don’t scream,
because the echoes here don’t come back the same way they left,
they twist into something else,
something with teeth,
and I’m tired of hearing my own fear thrown back at me
with a grin that’s too wide, too knowing.

I keep moving because stopping feels worse,
because standing still makes the walls close in tighter,
whispering things in a language I almost understand,
and I don’t want to know what they’re saying,
because if I do, I’ll never leave,
I’ll sink into the floor,
become another fucked-up part of this place,
just another shadow in the labyrinth,
another voice in the chorus of lunacy
that keeps this place breathing.

But maybe that’s the point.
Maybe there’s no exit,
no way out of this twisting, bleeding maze,
because the labyrinth isn’t the walls or the floor or the ceiling that drips sweat like it’s alive—
the labyrinth is me,
and I’ve been lost in my own fucking head this whole time,
running from the shadows I put there,
building walls I don’t know how to tear down,
and every turn just brings me back to the same goddamn place,
where the walls are too close,
and the floor won’t stop moving,
and the only thing waiting at the end is me,
grinning in the dark.

Almost Home

The trees lean in familiar, but the branches feel wrong.
Every mailbox is a memory, every mile drags too long.
Windows cracked open to rooms gone cold.
I see myself in the shadows—young, bruised, too old.

The porch still creaks under weight I can’t lose.
There’s blood on the welcome mat, and I know whose.
They say you can’t go back, but you never escape.
The house just waits quiet, the past wide awake.

The swings are still rusted, the yard overgrown.
The laughter’s long gone, but the yelling’s not gone.
Fingerprints on the doorframe, stains in the floor.
I count every heartbreak by cracks in the door.

There’s a name in the dust no one ever said right.
I sleep with the light on, I run from the night.
Old wounds in the wallpaper, grief in the paint.
I try to remember, but remembering ain’t.

Sometimes I stand in the kitchen and hear who I was.
The child who prayed quiet, the boy they forgot.
I want to forgive, but the years never heal.
The bruises grow deeper, the ache becomes real.

Almost home, just a turn from the start.
The map’s full of heartache, the world’s torn apart.
I walk through the ashes, the broken and blown.
I came back for answers, but I only found bones.

The air tastes like secrets, the silence is known.
I left so many times—
and I’m almost home.

Among the Graves of Yesteryears

Among the graves of yesteryears,
you strut with shadows on your heels,
dismiss your doubts, you’ve no more fears.
The tombstones whisper ancient deals.

Where once you faltered, now you dance.
Each specter’s moan a dark romance,
you waltz through terror, never sway,
dismiss your doubts, you’ve no more fears.

In moonlight’s grip, the dead improve
their chilling tales with smirks so sly.
They guard their secrets, none advance,
you stride with confidence through the sound.

The chill of death becomes your lance,
against the dark, you forge ahead.
The ghosts that murmur, still improve
your will to conquer all that lies.

Among the graves of yesteryears,
they tremble, knowing you’ll defy
their cryptic call with steady grace.
Your triumph’s carved in moonlight’s sigh,
the grave’s embrace you do outlast.
Dismiss your doubts, you’ve no more fears.

Among the Graves Where Silence Reigns

Amidst the graves where silence reigns,
you shatter chains, ignore the pains.
No ghosts of sorrow haunt your stride,
you laugh as darkened fears collide.

Where shadows fall, you take your stand,
unfazed by death’s cold, ghostly hand.
With every crypt and tombstone bare,
your spirit bursts beyond despair.

In graveyards deep where echoes fade,
you dance in moonlight, unafraid.
The dead may rest, but you won’t cease
to break the bonds and find your peace.

When specters moan and spectres creep,
you challenge fate, your will’s not cheap.
The silence thick, the night’s own snare,
can’t shackle you, nor cloak your flare.

Beneath the sky where shadows play,
you chart a course through cold decay.
Your courage shines through spectral gloom,
and mocks the darkness of the tomb.

Among the graves where silence reigns,
your spirit breaks unyielding chains.
No shroud of night or ghostly tale
can halt your march, or make you pale.

Ashes In Your Mouth

There’s glass in the street and the sky’s gone black.
We fuck on the kitchen floor, windows blown out back.
Sirens in the distance, walls shaking with doom,
but you’re riding me slow, the end won’t come soon.

We taste the world burning, grit in our teeth.
I bury my tongue in you, you beg me not to leave.
You scratch my chest bloody, you spit in my hair.
If this is our last night, then let’s die unaware.

Ashes in your mouth, my name on your tongue.
We’re fucking in the ruins, we’re sucking air in our lungs.
If the world ends tonight, let it end in your screams.
Let the bombs rain down, let’s end it obscene.

The sirens are closing, there’s blood in the hall,
but you bite at my neck, you beg for it all.
We come with the thunder, bodies covered in dust.
I kiss every bruise, I choke while I thrust.

We move like it’s ritual, like death’s at the door.
I fuck you ’til nothing, you cry out for more.
When the windows shatter, you smile, I curse.
You ride out the end—let’s see who comes first.

No heaven, no hell, just sweat and skin.
When the fire rolls in, I’ll be deep within.
If all we have left is this world burned out—
I want you gasping.
Ashes in your mouth.

When the fire is done and the city is bone,
I’ll taste you again, I’ll never be alone.
If this is our grave, let’s bury regret.
We’ll come one more time—
the world ain’t dead yet.

“This is the final broadcast. Breathe deep, hold someone,
and let the silence take you gently.
There’s nothing left to fear.”

Can you hear me?
Do you remember me?
“This is the final broadcast…”

Beneath Your Feet

Beneath your feet, the ground decays,
a map of broken truths.
Its every crack a story carved
of lost and shattered youths.

“Come closer,” whisper voices faint,
“The mile is where you’ll see.
The end you feared was never far—
it’s where you’re meant to be.”

Borrowed Heart, Unwritten Plague

Sterile dawn, surgery lights like judgment,
a man lies naked to the chest with hope for a future
beating on the edge of the knife.
Doctors move with the certainty of prophets—
scalpels dancing, gloves snapping,
every word measured to keep a secret from leaking into life.

A pig heart thuds quietly in a silver tray,
genes ghosted and tweaked to slip past the alarms in human flesh,
while nurses murmur prayers in code,
and anesthetists check vials,
and somewhere a mother clutches her phone,
desperate for any news less grim, less fresh.

Incisions cut through decades of waiting,
every stitch is a wager written in blood and high design,
because the body doesn’t care for miracles or headlines—
only if the pump keeps time.
Machine sings, suction whines,
and the surgeon’s hands hover—
can you really trick death with a beast’s muscle sewn under the bone?

A thousand years since pigs were gods and omens,
now their organs ride across borders, past quarantine,
to nest in the hollows of the desperate and alone.
Microbes drifting in the bright white silence,
patient zero unaware that his last chance
might be the world’s first new curse,
because every boundary broken is a question unasked,
a hunger unrehearsed.

Wake up shivering, chest raw as lightning,
bandages blooming with antiseptic and sweat.
The man hears the pulse and wonders:
is it gratitude or terror, this rhythm he can’t forget?
But in the hush between heartbeats, something stirs,
a tremor in the blood that no one named.
Every breath could be a warning,
every fever the birth of a new fear.

Down the ward, another patient waits for a miracle,
watching the news and the rain in the glass.
Lab techs scan for shadows—virus, prion,
hitchhiker tangled in a strand.
The pig lived in a bubble, the man behind plastic,
but one misstep, one unseen code,
and contagion walks hand in hand.

A world where nothing is sacred—
not borders, not bodies, not the line between farm and flesh.
Just a mother at the bedside,
a scientist at the monitor,
a nurse with a cross tattooed on her wrist,
each one hoping the crisis will pass.

But in the pulse and the hush,
in the deep ache after miracle,
there’s a silence that will not let go—
a thousand prayers that what’s borrowed
won’t cost more than any of us ever wanted to know.

Borrowed heart, untested fire.
Hope and dread in equal measure spin the wire.
Blood learns new music, but sings old pain.
Every beat’s a bargain, every breath a chain.
Pray what lives in the marrow sleeps unseen,
and what wakes in the dark stays between
pig and man, blade and bone,
because some debts are paid in plagues we bear alone.

Brain Rot and Broken Clocks

Fingers flick through flashing screens,
feeding me filth, force-fed and fake,
seconds stretch like snapped elastic,
every hour a hollow mistake.

Walls whisper wasted warnings,
windows warp with weathered grime.
I’m locked inside this looping nothing,
ticking time just wasting time.

Shuffle steps in silent circles,
carpet’s crushed beneath my weight.
Whispers whittle will to nothing,
watching clocks that won’t rotate.

Patterns pound inside my ribcage,
restless, wrecked, and paper-thin.
Banging doors and breaking mirrors
just to prove I still exist again.

Laughter lingers, long forgotten,
echoes empty in my chest.
Wired wrong, I wind up wanting
something sharp to end the rest.

Motionless but mind is racing,
running roads that never end.
Boredom’s just a different prison,
one where nothing lets you bend.

Boredom breeds a bitter beast,
burning bridges in my brain.
Circuits spinning, unchanging screaming,
everything just feels the same.

Mind is melting, minutes mocking,
waiting wears the soul away.
Bored to death but still surviving,
lost inside another day.

Brain Rot in a Pretty Dress

She smiled like a loaded syringe
and laughed while I choked on my doubt.
Fingers twitching, eyes glitching,
the walls were screaming but I couldn’t get out.

She painted the mirror with lipstick threats,
then licked the glass like it spoke her name.
Said love was a sickness you feed with nails,
and I swallowed it just the same.

I wore a straightjacket to bed
and she ripped it open with her tongue.
Said sanity’s for cowards,
then rode me hard till I moaned in a different lung.

Her smile twitched like a seizure,
her eyes kept blinking out of time.
She came and cried once,
then carved her name right into mine.

Brain rot in a pretty dress,
lipstick smeared like a fucking hex.
She bled red hearts and drank regret,
her kisses lit like cigarettes.

I tried to run but the doors kept shifting,
the floor fell up, the sink was fire.
She sucked my thoughts out through my dick
and built a throne on my desire.

They said I left last June,
but I’ve been here since she said “stay.”
And every night, her body’s back—
one more scream, one more brain decay.

I married madness in fishnets and heels,
she kissed the meds right off my face.
Brain rot, tits out, screaming yes—
this padded room is our sacred place.

Brainache

Morning crawls through the window like a thief,
pulls the blanket off my bones and whispers old receipts.
Last night’s headache’s grown teeth,
gnawing at the inside of my skull like a rat in the walls.
I count the cracks in the ceiling,
each one a nerve ready to snap.
Coffee’s no cure,
it just paints the pain a different shade of static.

Work shirt’s wet in the armpits,
stains I can’t remember making.
I taste copper and pennies,
something sour rides my tongue.
Mirror blinks at me,
mouth not quite in sync with my mind.
I think I said my hello,
but it came out as someone else’s apology.

Is this a headache or a warning?
Is this pain or prophecy?
The walls hum with voices,
but only one is mine—
the others scrape and giggle,
swapping stories about what I’ll do tonight.

Every throb is a shadow crawling closer,
every breath is a crack in the shell.
Slower and slower, the world bends at the corners,
dreams drip down my spine and ring the warning bell.

I drag myself through the day like a body bag.
Sunlight cuts my eyes.
I see the same stranger’s face on every screen.
Hands shake. Thoughts slither.
I’m swallowing glass just to taste what’s real—
someone says my name but it comes from behind my teeth,
a hunger, a grin,
a promise I don’t remember making.

Time’s all greasy—clocks melt,
numbers don’t line up anymore.
Is this the world,
or just a fever behind my eyes?
There’s a woman laughing, mouth too wide,
hands on my thighs—
maybe I called her, maybe she called me,
maybe we’re both here to see who bleeds first.

I can’t trust the mirror.
I can’t trust my hands.
Slipping between floors, between flesh and demands.
This is the crossroads.
This is the slip.
I’m not sure if I’m breaking,
or if I’ve already split.

Night comes slow—
not sleep, just the ache getting deeper.
Shadows stretch out, whispering,
“We’re almost home.”
Maybe tomorrow I’ll wake up real,
or maybe I’m already gone.

Burn The Hours

They said the future was golden, but all I see is rust.
Dead screens, empty promise, another dream turned to dust.
I was born for the middle—forgotten, unseen.
I learned to kneel in silence, learned to worship the machine.

But there’s gunpowder laughter simmering under my skin.
Every “no” they gave me just taught me how to sin.
I’m done with apologies, with hunger and prayer.
I’ll burn every second left, let the ashes fill the air.

The city is empty, the air’s gone stale.
Truth’s in the gutter, the liars prevail.
But I am not broken—I have no shame.
I carve new futures, I piss on their blame.

Light the torches, bring the noise.
Wake the lost girls, the angry boys.
We’ll riot in daylight, fuck in the rain.
If the world is ending, let’s savor the pain.

Take their medals, break their swords.
Turn every law into shattered words.
We are the end, we are the start.
Every heartbeat’s a fucking work of art.

Burn the hours, fuck the rules.
We’re not their cattle, not their fools.
Raise your glass to the broken, howl with the mad.
If it all goes under, it’s the best we ever had.

No regrets, just gasoline dreams—
let it burn, let us scream.
We’re the last ones laughing when the lights go black.
Burn the hours.
There’s no turning back.

Chrome Coffin Waltz

Neon hearses idling, engines purr like wolves,
window-tint reflections hide whatever sorrow holds.
Pallbearer ballerinas twirl in sequined grief,
dancing round a casket polished bright as disbelief.

Chrome coffin waltz on a ballroom of bones,
elegy in metal, dirge in dial tones.
Spin the dead forever under chandelier remorse,
chrome coffin waltz—decay with shiny force.

Undertaker DJ cues a requiem in steel,
footsteps click in tap-shoes made for dead-man appeal.
Corpses keep the rhythm with embalmer’s string and peg,
limbs obey choreography in rigor-mortis leg.

When the record crackles out, mourners lift their veils,
clutching souvenir sorrow in monogrammed nails.
Hearse doors slam percussion to dismiss the gilded gloom—
but echoes of the waltz haunt every after-room.

If grief demands a dance-floor, let mourning wear its chrome;
death is vain, and vanity will never die alone.

Coffin Break Room

Nine-to-five in a mausoleum, punch cards soaked in mold.
Karen from Crypt Ops brings donuts again—still bloodless, still cold.
The vampire in HR keeps biting interns, says it’s “an onboarding perk,”
and the succubus in finance moans through Zoom calls like it’s foreplay or work.

The water cooler gurgles Latin, the copier screams when you scan.
The werewolf from Marketing keeps shedding on the goddamn plan.
Break room smells like sulfur and spite,
and there’s always that one roach
who smokes in the fridge, snorts Splenda,
and quotes Nietzsche like a coach.

It’s the coffin break room, where the dead go to bitch.
Smoking bans don’t apply and your soul gets a glitch.
Got demons on lunch and banshees on call,
and if you’re still breathing by Thursday, you’re not trying at all.

Promotion’s just a darker corner and a desk that eats your pen,
with a screensaver of torment and a password that screams “again.”
No PTO, no weekends, just eternal sarcastic dread,
and the janitor’s possessed but cheaper than hiring the dead.

It’s the only place where the coffee comes cursed and the memes are alive,
but the gossip’s to die for—literally—and the pettiness thrives.

Coffin Couture II

I met her in a mausoleum runway show,
veil of cobwebs, stilettos to kill.
She said “Death’s the new black, darling,”
then winked with sockets hollow as her morals.

Walked like sin in high fashion,
left footprints that moaned in Latin.
Her perfume was formaldehyde and foreplay,
stitched her corset with epitaph thread.

Crossed her legs like a guillotine
snapping necks of regretful men.
Said she doesn’t cuddle,
just collects souls with complimentary neck bites.

Coffin couture, dressed to possess—
she turns seances into sex dreams.
Catwalks on tombstones, moaning in monochrome,
riding grief like a throne.

She fucked me in a hearse
and critiqued my posture mid-thrust.
Slapped me for breathing too loud,
then whispered “Good boy” with a growl.

Said “Goth isn’t dead, just bored and horny”—
then bit through my tie.
I tried to leave once but she hexed my shadow,
now I only move when she purrs.

We honeymoon in graveyards,
her vows tattooed in bruises.
And every climax ends with a curse
in cursive across my chest.

She doesn’t do morning-after, just dusk-before.
Leaves me lipstick-stamped obituaries on the fridge.
Coffin couture—baby,
she fucks like death with a signature smile.

Coffin Couture

I wear black not for mourning,
but to match my fucking mood.
Painted lips like sin incarnate,
high heels built for a feud.

I strut past graves like it’s fashion week in the afterlife.
Corset tight like a secret you can’t admit out loud.
Smile like a guillotine, charm like a mushroom cloud.
Lace soaked in perfume and probable cause.

Coffin couture—darling, I slay funerals.
Eyeliner sharp, tongue even crueler.
I bring a eulogy and a shopping list,
and I never forget which is which.

I’ve kissed boys in crypts and danced on bones in halls.
My therapist quit session six, said, “Damn, you’re too enthralled.”
I took it as a compliment, then hexed him for fun.

I’ve dated ghosts with better conversation than the living.
Been married to misery twice, annulled by Thanksgiving.
Don’t confuse tragedy with taste—it’s not my fault I make it look good.

So bury me in stilettos, spray tan and snide remarks.
Give me death, but make it glam, with sequins in the dark.
‘Cause when I rise again, I’m charging for autographs.

Corpse Factory

The machines are relentless, the blood’s the vital sign,
in the factory of the damned, where death’s the design.
The stench of decay is constant, the screams are mechanized,
in the heart of the horror, where the life is compromised.

We work through the night, in the cold and the gore,
in the corpse factory’s heart, where death’s the core.
The factory’s a nightmare, the work is dark and grim,
in the world of the lifeless, where the light is dim.

We process the bodies, in the cruel machine’s embrace,
in the corpse factory’s world, where the darkness finds its place.

Corpse factory, where death’s a cruel art,
in the cold, industrial night, where the horror starts.
In the processing of the lifeless, where the nightmares arise,
corpse factory endures, in the darkness it lies.

Corruption

In the heart of the city’s core,
where power’s grasp seeks more and more,
a politician with a smile
hides his lies and greedy cunning.

Hands that shake in false accord,
deals that line his pocket’s hoard.
Every promise made for gain,
feeding on the public’s pain.

Behind closed doors, the money flows,
a hidden world where darkness grows.
Contracts signed with secret bribes,
hidden truths and whispered lies.

The city’s streets, they crumble down,
while he wears a golden crown.
In every alley, every street,
the people suffer from deceit.

A mother cries for justice lost,
her child’s future sold for cost.
While in his mansion, safe and sound,
he watches as the world spins round.

In the shadows where deals are made,
the city’s heart begins to fade.
Every promise a broken dream,
in the web of power’s scheme.

Whispers of a revolution grow,
in the places where despair does show.
People rise with angry cries,
tired of living in disguise.

The walls of power start to crack,
under the weight of the people’s lack.
A reckoning that’s long been due,
as the corrupt begin to rue.

In the city where darkness spread,
hope begins to rise from the dead.
But the fight is far from won,
as they face the rising sun.

Courage’s Graveyard

Beneath a sky that never grants relief,
in soil stamped by centuries of failed resolve,
heroes are buried by their own ambitions,
marked by stones that mock and absolve.

What’s left is not silence,
but the aftertaste of every scream bitten back in the dark—
a graveyard where courage is not missing,
just drowned beneath the weight of every mark.

Ghosts in boots still patrol the broken paths,
hunting for scraps of what once felt brave,
while bones whisper rumors through fractured teeth,
promising courage even the bold can’t save.

There’s no glory carved in these moss-furred stones,
only the cracked grins of the ones who tried,
the thrill of standing tall, for a heartbeat,
on trembling knees they could never hide.

Fear is not the enemy, just the price
carved into skin with every decision made—
every step in the rotten dark, every plea in the rain,
every dare not betrayed.

Bravery rots in the open,
spattered by the mud of nights nobody survived clean,
not a virtue or a victory,
just a blood-slick urge to confront what cannot be seen.

Here, legends lie half-awake,
stripped of their armor and dragged into the dirt,
every “hero” reduced to hunger and doubt,
nothing left but the memory of hurt.

There is no reward but survival,
no parade for the bruised and the bent.
Courage is a myth rewritten by the scared—
raw, ugly, and never heaven-sent.

Every shadow in this place is a teacher,
every chill a lesson repeated in dust.
True courage is not the absence of fear,
but walking on—splinters in the skin, pride turned to rust.

Let the mourners weep for the fallen.
Let the liars raise their cups to the dead.
But the honest ones know:
every bold step was a gamble, every boast a thread.

Here, in this graveyard, courage is not a story,
not a prize or a song to be sung—
it’s a shadow moving through the night,
trembling, battered, but never truly gone.

Crawling Through The Abyss

Lost in a world that’s painted black,
strapped to the weight, I can’t turn back.
The walls are closing, the ceiling’s cracked.
I’m crawling through the abyss, there’s no way back.

Voices in my head, they scream my name.
They twist and turn, but it’s all the same.
No escape from the burning flame.
I’m locked in this game, trapped in the pain.

The shadows surround, pulling me down.
Each step I take, I start to drown.
No lifeline, I’m too far gone.
Screaming in silence, trying to hold on.

Can’t break the chains, can’t fight the night.
Every breath I take is a twisted fight.
The walls keep whispering lies in my ear,
but I can’t stop crawling through the fear.

I’ve lost myself in the blackened depths.
Only the echo remains of my final breath.
Crawling through the abyss, till the end of days.
In this cage of chaos, forever I’ll stay.

Cut The Lights

Tick of the clock, breath in the dark.
Sharpen the grin as the world falls apart.
I slip through the screen like a shadow on fire,
heartbeat’s a hammer and the moon’s my choir.

Every scream’s a chorus, every footstep’s prey.
I’m the ghost in the mirror you throw out each day.
No mask can hide the mess I became.
I’m your midnight confession with a butcher’s name.

The houses go silent when I rattle the gate.
Kids dare each other to look, it’s too late.
Your prayers are as useless as locks on the door.
You’re dust in the air, blood on the floor.

I’m the song on the radio they never replay,
the red in your eye at the end of the day.
Carve my story with a kitchen knife.
You made a legend—now choke on the life.

They ran, they begged, they cried, they lied,
but no one ever leaves until I decide.

Under the mask, I’m grinning.
Under the skin, you’re thinning.
Keep your heroes, keep your prayers—
I’ll be the last sound you hear.

Cut the lights, call the night.
Every shadow’s just my bite.
Run if you want, hide if you can,
but the credits roll when I lift my hand.

Cut the lights, let the dark begin.
I was born for the kill and I’ll always win.

Dance on Your Grave

Hairspray, heartbreak—guess who’s back?
The queen of trash in a cheetah bra strap.

Dead Girls Never Ghost You

I met her at a graveyard rave—
lace corset, crooked grin, eyes like unpaid debt.
Said she only dates the living ironically,
and I was just sober enough to qualify.

Her tongue was colder than my last girlfriend’s soul
and twice as honest.
We made out behind a mausoleum,
carved our names in the headstone.

She said, “I like you ’cause you already look half-dead.”
I said, “I’ve been practicing.”
And when she bit my neck,
I came slightly and died slightly, not sure of the order.

Dead girls never ghost you—they haunt proper.
They moan at night, but it’s usually your name.
And when they say “forever,”
they actually fucking mean it.

Took her home, but she preferred coffins—
slept curled in my bathtub instead.
She left cryptic poems in my fridge
and stole all my warmest hoodies.

My cat loves her, which is weird,
’cause he hates everything that isn’t tuna or Satan.
My ex texted “U up?” and I showed my ghost—
she deleted her own number in fear.

We don’t argue—she just flickers the lights
’til I apologize.
And honestly, I like that better
than screaming matches with the living.

She’ll never age, never cheat,
never ask me to go to brunch.
Just whispers filth in Latin
and drips ectoplasm when she’s horny.

Love’s a grave thing,
but at least I finally found someone
who stays dead loyal.

Decay’s Promise

In crumbling walls where rust’s decree,
the stories of decay unfold,
each flake a whisper of the old.

Abandoned spires in twilight’s plea,
each end, a veil where truths are sold,
in crumbling walls where rust’s decree.

Once bright structures, now memories,
yield to time’s relentless mold.
New forms arise from what’s been cold.

Destruction writes in gold and greed,
yet through each ruin, hope’s retold,
in crumbling walls where rust’s decree.

Rust paints the end, but don’t concede,
for life’s harsh touch is merely bold.
A fresh start hides where decay’s been sown.

Decay is art, the truths we need,
the cycle’s old, yet new and cold,
in crumbling walls where rust’s decree.

Decomposing

The body is already in the process, not in death alone,
the living body is the body in the overthrown
equilibrium of construction and decay occurring
at the cellular level simultaneously, the blurring
of the line between the built and the unbuilt is not
a feature of the end but of the whole.

What we got is a body that is always building
and unbuilding itself,
the living and the dying on the same shelf.

I find it oddly comforting, the continuity of the process,
the fact that what I fear in the terminus
is already happening and I am already living it
and the living of it is not the ending of it.

The cells that are sloughing off the skin today
are replaced before the week is out.
The day of the dying of the cell
is also the day of the made.
The body is its own replacement and the trade.

Decomposing is not only what happens at the end.
Decomposing is the daily and the trend
of the living body processing itself and its resource.
Decomposing is the method and the course.

I am the sum of a billion daily decompositions,
the aggregate of the cellular transitions
that have been occurring since before I knew my own address,
the body managing its complicated mess
of construction and deconstruction simultaneously,
and the self that watches this is just the tumultuously
aware byproduct of all that biological work,
the consciousness that came along for the ride in the murk.

Decomposition

It’s the most natural thing in every ecosystem,
the body’s final contribution to the loop,
the breakdown of the protein and the prism
of the cells returning to the group.

We are rented, not purchased, said the carbon,
borrowed from the air and from the soil,
and when we’re done the debt is paid and pardon
comes in the form of joining the great coil.

The bacteria were here before the mammals,
they’ll be here when the mammals have returned,
and what we call death from our provincial angle
is just the balance being reaffirmed.

I find a kind of comfort in the science,
the elegant accounting of the earth,
the perfect environmental compliance
of every death becoming someone’s birth.

My atoms have been through a star already,
they’ve been through dinosaurs and through the sea,
and everything they’ve gathered holds them steady
just long enough to briefly become me.

And when I’m done they’ll redistribute widely
through the water table and the air and ground,
and everything that was assembled rightly
will dissemble and be scattered and be found
in something else that calls itself alive.

Decomposition is the earth’s own taking back,
the reclamation of what’s borrowed from the black
of soil and of water and of air that is on loan.
Every living thing returns what it has known.

Decompression Sickness

Nitrogen dissolves inside the blood at pressure in the deep,
and if you rise too fast the bubbles wake from their deep sleep,
and form inside the tissues and the joints and in the brain,
and what they call the bends will turn ascent into a pain.

The lesson of the bends is not to surface in a rush.
The lesson of the bends is that the ascent needs the hush
of careful staging, pausing at the decompression stop,
before you let the pressure differential drop.

I surfaced from a season once without the staging stops,
went from full depth to daylight skipping all the drops,
and felt the nitrogen of all I had suppressed at depth
bloom into the tissue and compress my every breath.

Decompression sickness, coming up too fast.
Decompression sickness, nothing built to last.
Decompression sickness, every nitrogen bubble blooms.
Decompression sickness in the joints and in the rooms.

Descent Into the Abyss

In the dark, I hear her whisper, a voice I can’t ignore.
Shadows crawl like hungry beasts beneath the cracked floor.
Eyes like fire, she feeds my fears, the world begins to break,
a mind undone, a twisted game, this nightmare’s mine to take.

Her laughter cracks the air like glass, it shatters through the night.
Her words like poison seeping in, I lose the will to fight.

Every corner hides a monster, every shadow hides a name.
She carved her mark across my soul, she set my mind aflame.
I tried to run but lost the road, the walls are closing in.
She’s in my head, she’s all I see, her touch a wicked sin.

The air is thick with agony, I hear her cry of glee,
a prisoner to this maddening dance, it’s all that’s left of me.

I see her in the mirror now, her smile is all I see.
Her eyes, they burn right through my soul, they’re taking all of me.
My reflection is a broken man, lost to this despair.
Her grip so tight, there’s nothing left, no strength for me to care.

The silence screams, the darkness calls, I’ll never find my way.
She’s in my mind, she’s in my soul, I’m hers until the day.
Descent into the abyss, where hell begins to break.
There’s no escape, no light to save, the depths I can’t forsake.

Descent

The first descent by human into the hadal zone
was in a sphere of steel and plexiglass, alone,
in the sense that the abyss did not know we were there,
and would not have cared regardless of what we declare.

Walsh and Piccard in the Trieste sixty years ago
watched the steel viewport creak and crack and saw the glow
of the searchlights on the sediment below their feet,
and the descent was complete when the floor said complete.

I have had my own descents into the bottom of things,
and what I found at bottom was not what the dread brings
in the anticipation of the going down.
Descent to the floor is simpler than the sound.

Descent, descent, the needle going past the max.
Descent, descent, the pressure on the tracks.
Descent, descent, until the floor appears.
Descent, descent, past all the surface fears.

Dominion’s Descent

Harboring hearts in the heat of hell’s hold,
hunger hewn from the havoc that harbingers herald.
Powers plucked from the pit, ploys perilously proposed,
sovereigns of sin, so silently supposed.

Hell’s power, in the pulse of the underworld’s pace,
a kingdom crafted in chaos, caught in the cradle’s caress.
Fear’s fire feeds the forge, where fate’s flames grow,
a throne thrives in the throes, where the wretched reap what they sow.

Beneath burdens, the bastions of bedlam are built,
with whispers woven within walls of woe and guilt.
Echoes embittered by the edges of the eons’ end,
legions languish, their loyalties left to bend.

Dominion’s descent, draped in the dark’s delight,
a fabric of turmoil, tangled in the tyrant’s might.
The crown’s cruel caress, commanding the core,
rulers rise and reign, riveted to the roar.

Don’t Whistle Near a Graveyard

Don’t whistle near a graveyard.
Don’t sleep with your head facing north.
Throwing rice at weddings brings good luck.

Each Step Digs Deep

Each step digs deep, the ground decays,
the sky it groans, its fractured gaze.
The veil unravels, thread by thread,
a fragile bridge where dreams have bled.

Evergreen Rot

December drags its teeth across the gutters and shingles, freezing every mistake you made this year in the cracks of your windows,
The heater rattles its death rattle, blowing stale, burnt air that never touches your skin,
You stand at the window, breath fogging the glass, and trace a middle finger through frost that clings like old guilt,
Outside, red and green lights flicker, but they’re just sickly stains in the fog,
And the neighbor’s Santa is slumped against the porch like a drunk, half his smile ground into the muddy yard,
Somewhere on the next street, a car backfires,
Somebody yells fuck you at the sky,
Their voice slicing through the carols leaking unchanging from the discount radio,
It’s Christmas in a house that smells like old coffee, cheap whiskey, and the ghosts of every person who swore they’d come back.

The tree leans in the corner, fake pine needles dusting the carpet,
Decorated in broken memories—tiny picture frames with faces scratched out or turned to the wall,
A reindeer missing a leg, an angel with singed wings,
You wrap gifts for people who stopped speaking to you,
Write To: No One on tags, just to feel the sting of writing anything at all,
Last year’s promises still stuck to the baseboard,
Sticky tape and dried blood from a cut that never healed,
And you find yourself humming along to “Silent Night”
While biting your tongue so you don’t spit out every ugly thing you want to say.

Kids outside whip dirty snowballs at each other’s faces,
Their laughter jagged, high,
The kind that always means someone is about to cry,
You light another cigarette with shaking hands and blow smoke toward the blinking lights,
Remember every December you tried to believe in something warm,
Before your mother stopped singing,
Before your father started drinking the daylight away,
Before you learned that the only thing waiting for you under the tree was silence,
And the cold that crawled into your chest and made itself a home.

You eat dry turkey at your aunt’s,
Each chew a countdown to another awkward silence,
Fork scraping across your tongue,
A string of bullshit well-wishes stuck in your throat,
Unwrap a bar of soap and socks you’ll never wear,
A card that says “Hope you’re well,”
But there’s no one left in that house who ever hoped for anything,
You drink until your vision runs,
Until the tree blurs into a dead thing wrapped in lights,
And you fall asleep on the couch,
Tangled in scratchy blankets,
Dreaming of snow piling up outside the door,
Dreaming of pine needles stabbing your lungs until you forget how to breathe.

Christmas isn’t hope—
It’s muscle memory,
It’s the sound of footsteps that never reach your door,
It’s the memory of voices calling your name from another room,
It’s the weight of absence under blinking lights,
It’s love left to rot in the corner—
Evergreen,
Unforgiven,
Still pretending to live.

Fix Me Again

I’ve got bruises that spell your intent in black and blue.
My voice is gone from screaming, my hands shake, my body’s used.
You taste like midnight chemicals, sweat and confession.
I chase your venom, your teeth, your desperate obsession.

We fuck like we’re starving, like the world’s burning down.
You ride me to pieces, I drag you back to the ground.
It isn’t love, it’s a craving, a hunger, a sin.
We keep tearing each other apart just to start it again.

You scratch your initials in the sweat on my chest.
I drown in your darkness, I ache for your mess.
You leave me trembling, emptied, a body not whole,
but every time you vanish, I crawl back for more.

We’ve burned down the night, we’ve fucked through the dawn.
I keep coming back, I’m too far gone.
You know how to shatter me, pull me apart,
but I’ll beg for the splinters, I’ll worship the scars.

Fix me again—break my resolve.
Tie me to madness I can’t dissolve.
I want your dirt, your spit, your pulse on my tongue.
I want to wake up wrecked and raw, undone.

You’re the needle, the whiskey, the bruise on my skin.
The more that you ruin, the more I give in.
Don’t save me, don’t cure me—just fuck me insane.
I want your poison.
I want your stain.

Flash of Stupid

Midnight and bitter, one bad decision at a time,
another dare, another bottle, chasing comfort in the grime.
I see her smile—red flags, red lips, red lights I blow through,
trading sense for sensation, and I always come unglued.

I’ve got bruises for souvenirs and ghosts for friends.
I crash into the consequence and pretend it never ends,
telling lies to my reflection, running barefoot through regret,
tasting blood and laughter, just not finished losing yet.

Sunrise is a letdown, another burn to explain.
Ashes in my coffee, dumb luck in my veins.
All apologies are empty, all my promises thin.
I’ll do it all again—stupid’s how I begin.

Can’t kill the urge, can’t kill the pain.
I’ll keep dancing with disaster till I’m lost in the rain,
still chasing that static, still begging for more,
still burning for the high I can’t afford.

Flash of stupid, one more scar I wear.
Every “fuck it” in my pocket, every empty dare.
I set myself on fire just to watch it glow,
and I never learn the lesson—always gotta know.

Fucking Holy

Saints cross the street when I’m coming down the block.
Priests clutch their pearls, mothers triple-lock.
Got a crucifix burn where I kissed her neck,
and every Bible in town’s missing pages I wrecked.

Confession booth’s out of order.
I pissed in the holy water.
The choirboys went hoarse trying to pray me away,
but I light up the altar anyway.

They tried to drown me in guilt, said I’d never be saved,
but I learned all my best sins from the saints they enslaved.
Rosaries snap when they touch my skin.
I fucked up their heaven and came back grinning.

Baptized in whiskey and back alley sweat.
Every “amen” just makes me harder to forget.
I kicked down the gates, I spit on the throne,
gave their angels a show, made the devil moan.

Stigmata scars, mouth full of blasphemy.
I laugh as they curse, can’t you see—
every scar’s a medal, every bruise a prayer.
If there’s a God, he’s too scared to care.

They write me off in sermons, I scribble back in blood.
Crack open their scriptures and roll ’em up for fun.
My congregation’s tattooed, wasted, and wild.
We turn confession to a gangbang and heaven to a trial.

Take your forgiveness, shove it where you bleed.
I only kneel when it’s someone else’s need.
I’m the blessing and the plague, the flesh and the fear.
Fuck your redemption—I’m already here.

Let ’em wail, let ’em plead, let ’em choke on their psalms.
I’ll fuck on their altar, I’ll laugh as it bombs.
No pearly gates for a bastard like me,
but the pit’s got music and the drinks are free.

Fucking holy, down on my knees.
Worship the filth, get off on disease.
Sanctified bastard, grace in my spit.
Pissing on commandments, never gonna quit.
Fucking holy, crowned in sin.
The more you hate me, the more I win.

Generational Infection

My father’s patterns lived in me before I learned to see them,
the way the body absorbs the posture of the system
that formed it in the early years before the self is hardened
into something you can call your own and still be pardoned.

He didn’t mean to pass it, and he probably doesn’t know
that what he carried from his own father’s long ago
is something I still navigate in rooms he’s never entered,
and address in language that he doesn’t have.

The trauma research says it alters the epigenetic
expression of the code, the cellular kinesthetic
response to threat is calibrated by the history
of what the ancestors survived.

Which means the body I was born in was already tuned
to the threat-frequency that had bloomed
through my grandfather’s catastrophe
and wired the response into what was given to me.

I’m trying to be the generation where the chain adjusts,
where I work on what I carry so the transfer doesn’t thrust
the same calibration into the next link of the line.

I’m not optimistic that I’m doing it completely right,
but the attempt itself is something different than the flight
from acknowledging what’s there.
The infection visible at last
is harder to pass forward than the unnamed from the past.

Generational infection, the sickness moves through time.
Generational infection, passing down the line.
Each generation carries what it got and didn’t choose.
Generational infection and the remediation’s news.

Gingerbread Graveyard

Deep in the woods where the branches hunch low and the path tastes bitter on a frightened tongue, there squats a cottage frosted thick with lies, every candy tile and sugared brick a trap laid for the young,
I smell the rot behind the syrup, feel the sour under all that shining glaze, see gumdrop teeth along the windowsill grinning wide while licorice veins crack through the walls in crooked maze,
Crumbs on the soil look harmless, little pearls of promise scattered soft and light, but every step that follows them sinks deeper in the breath of ovens breathing in the night,
Names are carved in cookie headstones half-buried under icing, little letters melting back to dirt, and every time my boot comes down I hear a muffled echo of a child still tasting hurt.

Hunger led them, hunger leads me, empty hands reaching for a crust that isn’t theirs to keep,
Sugar on the air, ash in the ground, every bite a vow that something else will never wake from sleep.

Welcome to the Gingerbread Graveyard where the sweetness hides a famine that will never really end, where the fence is built from little bones and every jaw of candy cracks another spine that tried to bend,
Here the windows glow like promises while the chimney coughs up prayers that failed to crawl back out, and the witch hums low in the kitchen with a smile that fits her skull the way a noose fits doubt.

She stands in the doorway smelling like burnt sugar and grave dirt, eyes bright as boiled glass, tongue dipped in honeyed poison as she pats the oven door and tells me hunger’s going to pass,
Her hands look gentle until you see the flour worked into the cracks where little fingernails once clawed, see the way her fingertips tap measuring “just enough” of every soul she saw as flawed.

Around us jars hold marbled shapes that might once have been a wish, hard candy hearts that never got the chance to beat, and on the rafters hang the silhouettes of stories she preferred to overheat.

In the corners stand the pale remains of children who believed the smell instead of all the warning in their skin, drifting shapes with hollow eyes who try to mouth “go back” while the cupboards beg me in,
One boy whispers of a banquet that turned to iron when the latch came down, tells me how the sugar roof collapsed and buried both their laughter and their town.

This is what you get when love forgets its promise and leaves a child alone with empty bowls and quiet floors,
Every abandoned hunger grows an invitation, every unmet touch becomes a knock on wicked doors.

I walk away with smoke in my hair and ashes on my tongue and all their stories sticking to my teeth,
Every step I take from that sick house grinds another candy skull to powder in the leaves beneath,
I will not die inside her kitchen, I will not let her write my name in icing on a slab of stale regret,
Let the Gingerbread Graveyard keep its pretty lies and stolen children—I am not another craving she gets to net.

Glass Jaw

The mirror’s cracked and bleeding, but it’s only my reflection.
I wear my old confessions like a throat full of infection.
I build my walls from panic, line the halls with dread.
Sleep with the lights on, keep the monsters in my head.

There’s voices in the corners, shadows in the phone.
I count the pills, count the steps, but I’m never alone.
My grip is slipping, the room starts to tilt.
Paranoia’s a comfort—fear’s the bed I’ve built.

I hear footsteps I never remember making.
Feel cold fingers underneath my skin even while I’m shaking.
Trust is a razor I keep pressed to my tongue.
Speak in broken riddles, bleed out when I’m done.

Every memory’s poison, every hope is a trick.
The monster wears my face, the monster’s too quick.
Walls closing in, ceiling caving down.
If I could run from myself, I’d torch this whole town.

Don’t tell me “it’s nothing”—I know how it ends.
The cracks grow wider, I lose all my friends.
All I can offer is fragments and rage.
You can hold the pieces, but you can’t stop the break.

Glass jaw, glass mind.
I shatter when I scream.
Every piece cuts deeper, nothing is what it seems.
I punch my own shadow, beg it to fight,
but I only bleed out, night after night.

I’d rather break on my own than let you try to bind.
So stand in the hallway, watch from afar.
You can’t love the splinters
underneath a glass jaw.

Good Vibes Bad Mouth

I hold the door for strangers
tip too much when I’m broke as hell and living on noodles and loose change
I text my people when I feel them fading
drag them out for walks
remind them their specific brand of weird doesn’t need to change
I rescue spiders in the bathtub like a soft-hearted idiot who thinks every tiny life deserves a ride to the open air
Then I stub my toe on the way back to bed and scream the kind of words that would make a preacher stare.

They say “such language from a sweetheart
you should really watch that mouth
” But sugar never saved a single engine from stalling out and heading south
Kindness in my chest and thunder on my tongue
that’s how I’m built, I don’t do guilt.

Good vibes, bad mouth
I’ll love you hard and swear out loud
Hug you tight then curse the storm that tried to knock you to the ground
If you need a gentle shoulder and a darker sense of humor too
Good vibes, bad mouth, that’s me
all messed up and true.

I send voice notes saying “proud of you” then ruin the Hallmark moment with a joke about how we’re all just damaged freaks
I’ll talk you down from panic at three in the morning
then roast your ex for sport and call him names for weeks
I will show up with soup when you’re sick and sit on your floor doing dishes while you rant about your job and cry
And every time you say “sorry for the mess
” I’ll say “shut the fuck up, you look human
you’re allowed to be alive.”

They want us soft voiced, measured
always shaking hands and whispering praise
But love from me comes in power chords and F-bombs thrown like bouquets
If I’m wrong for mixing tenderness with trash talk
I’m not changing my ways.

Good vibes, bad mouth
I’ll love you hard and swear out loud
Hug you tight then curse the storm that tried to knock you to the ground
If you need a gentle shoulder and a darker sense of humor too
Good vibes, bad mouth, that’s me
all messed up and true.

I won’t police my tongue while the world spins lies with a frozen grin
Labeling cruelty as “professional” while they tear the spirit from the skin
Give me rough-edged honesty
give me laughs that shake the frame
Give me “I fucking love you” over “kind regards” signed with a name.

Grave Dancer

In the cemetery of lost time,
where passions rise from shadows cast,
lust ain’t no specter in this rhyme,
it’s a force that’s built to last.

No fear in the dark we claim,
embracing drives that burn within.
From the earth, our primal flame,
we rise, igniting life again.

Tombstones murmur secret lore,
of fervent love and fire bright.
In this realm, hearts fail no more,
desires laid bare in the night.

Rust and patina may decay,
yet our blaze will never quell.
We live for each fleeting day,
scaling every epic hill.

In these graves where shadows weep,
we conjure rhythms bold and pure.
From spectral depths, our spirits leap,
our hearts’ true fire, fierce and sure.

Every dance, a darkened rite.
Every beat, a rebel’s call.
In the silence of the night,
we rise and never, ever fall.

So in this sacred, haunted ground,
where echoes of the past still reign,
our spirits’ melodies resound
and live beyond the grave’s domain.

Graveglass Lullaby

The windows wake before the house does, skin of the night gone white and brittle, every pane wearing a mask of frost that looks delicate from across the room and sharp enough to fillet a pulse if you lean in too close.
Outside, the streetlamp presses its tired glow against the glass like a drunk trying to get back into a bar that banned him years ago, refused softly by that thin sheet of frozen breath that turns every light into a funeral bouquet of broken halos.

The frost moves in from the edges first, creeping like gossip along the frame, filigree of knives pretending to be lace.
Little branching arteries of ice crawling inward, sketching cold veins over the view, until the world beyond the glass is nothing but a smeared suggestion of dark trees, half-buried cars, and a sky that gave up on color somewhere after October.

You stand in the faded living room, socks half-wet from yesterday’s melted snow, watching the crystal graffiti spread.
It etches its white tattoos across the window, line by line, a quiet vandal with an artist’s precision and a serial killer’s patience.
Every curve and hook of frozen pattern looks pretty until you realize it’s drawing a cage you volunteered for years ago without reading the fine print.

Behind the frost, the neighborhood is muffled, wrapped in a thick hush that feels less like peace and more like the pause before something important doesn’t happen again.
No kids’ laughter, no salt trucks grinding by, just distant pipes knocking in the walls like old bones arguing with the boiler about whose turn it is to fall apart this week.

You remember winters where these windows sweated instead of shivered, when the inside was hot from too many bodies, too much food, too many stupid arguments about nothing that all sounded like love trying to put on adult clothes.
Back then the frost stayed outside, respectful, just a pale ring along the edges where the glass couldn’t quite keep up with the chaos of people breathing, talking over each other, kissing in hallways they pretended were accidents.

Now the frost is the loudest presence in the room, crawling over old fingerprints and smudges left by smaller hands that don’t visit.
It climbs right over the faint outline where somebody once drew a heart and an initial in condensation, the way vines strangle a gravestone without caring who is underneath.
You can still see it if you tilt your head and squint, a blurred echo of a promise that expired without anyone calling to cancel the appointment.

The patterns look like ferns, feathers, veins, shattered spiderwebs, everything but what they actually are.
Cold made visible, that’s all, the breath of the season pressed flat and sharpened until it can slice your mood on contact.
Still, your brain keeps assigning meaning, faces in the curls of ice, eyes in the swirls, a mouth here that looks like it’s about to say your name and then think better of it.

Your breath ghosts the glass when you step closer, human heat trying to negotiate with winter’s signature.
For a second the frost retreats in a tiny circle, sweating into transparency, revealing a peephole to the outside world.
Then the circle closes again, your warm interference sealed over by a fresh ring of crystals that erase even that small act of defiance.

These windows used to frame snowball fights, surprise visits, headlights pulling in with that little flare of stupid hope that maybe this year would fix the ones before it.
Now they frame absence like it’s art, hanging the blank outside in a neat rectangle of ice.
Winter turning your life into a gallery of missing people and conversations that never made it past draft form.

You press your palm flat to the pane, know it’s a dumb move and do it anyway.
Cold hits straight through skin and bone, a clean shot that bypasses all the layers you built up since the last time you let someone put their hand over your heart and call it home.
The glass doesn’t give, the frost doesn’t flinch, it just keeps singing its silent song of loss in slow, quiet strokes.

This is winter’s handwriting on your house, cursive loops of frozen breath writing elegies no one asked for.
Each delicate branch of ice a line about something that used to live here and doesn’t anymore.
Old laughter, old fights, old forgiveness that took too long to arrive and found the seats already empty.

You step away, leave the frost to its vigil.
Let it guard the border between inside and out, between what you lost and what you still haven’t managed to ruin.
Behind you, the house exhales, old wood settling, pipes muttering, couch cushions remembering everyone who ever collapsed into them after a day that hurt too much.
And in the panes, the ice keeps writing its soft, cruel poem about a winter that knows your name and presses its lips to the glass instead of knocking on the door.

Graveyard Fashion Show

Marble runway glitters under phosphorus moon,
coffin-lid catwalk creaks a rattling tune.
Models stitch their rib-cage corsets tight with sighs,
graveyard fashion show sells afterlife disguise.

Shovel-flash photographers blind the tombstone rows,
skull-capped designers fit the maggots in repose.
Eyeball brooches glitter, spinal necklaces swing,
funeral-home fragrances embalming everything.

Step right up—graveyard fashion show.
Silk-lined boxes spotlight bones that glow.
Haute-macabre couture where the living won’t go,
strut that rigor glamour, the graveyard fashion show.

Finale drops the curtain made of burial shrouds,
audience of statues claps with thunderclouds.
Tickets float to topsoil when the lanterns fail,
graveyard fashion show signs your coffin mail.

Beauty dies but beauty sells—graveyard’s always hiring;
wear your finest vacancy, the dirt is never tiring.

Graveyard Kiss

Beneath the moonlight, I see her face,
a lover’s ghost, with a cold embrace.
Her lips are pale, her touch is death,
a graveyard kiss, with every breath.

Her eyes are hollow, but I can’t resist,
a forbidden touch, in the fog and mist.
She pulls me close, I feel her heat,
a lover’s curse, in death’s heartbeat.

We dance among the tombstones cold,
a love so dark, a love so bold.
Her lips of ice, her soul of fire,
graveyard kiss, a sweet desire.

I can’t escape, I’m chained to her.
This love so bitter, it makes me stir.
She haunts my dreams, she haunts my soul,
a graveyard kiss, that takes control.

Graveyard kiss, in the dead of night.
Love that’s lost, but feels so right.
She whispers softly, then fades away.
Graveyard kiss, forever in the dark.
Love eternal, a lingering mark.

Graveyard Reprise

Six feet of clay, maggots in my grin,
the soil remembers every scream I’ve pinned.
Blood thick as secrets, black under the tongue,
I claw from the dirt when the warnings are sung.

Legends are cowards, hiding behind locks.
I’m the sick little voice that laughs when the heartbeat stops.
My shadow’s a rumor that lives in the crawlspace.
I haunt every basement where terror has a face.

No ghost, no chains, no rattling lies,
just meat and memory and rot in my eyes.
I’m the itch in your bones when the sun goes black,
the hand on your throat when you won’t look back.

Fingernails cracked, hands full of graves,
my love song is written in the scars I gave.
I’m not some phantom, not a trick or a tale,
just boots on your chest and the weight of betrayal.

Every locked door, every whispered prayer—
I was born from your fear, I was nursed on despair.
Blood on the stairs, hair in the drain,
I’m the throb in your skull that screams out your name—
but not the one they gave you, the one you earned,
scratched on the walls with every lesson you learned.

Rats in the rafters, teeth in the dark.
Every old wound remembers my mark.
I feed on the shriek when the power goes dead.
I’m the wet thing breathing underneath your bed.

Not an angel, not a demon, just the knife in the crawl,
the silence that follows when you can’t scream at all.
I gut every hero, I poison their cause.
I dance with the cowards who die for applause.

This grave is a cradle, this coffin a stage.
I serenade bones and the ache of the cage.
I kill by the dozen, I feast by the score.
Every corpse is a chorus, every scream an encore.

Tell your children my story, hope they never believe—
but I’ll claw up the drainpipe and wipe my hands on your sleeve.
I’m the secret you swallow, the filth that you breathe,
a love letter written with razors in the weave.

You can bury me deeper, you can salt every trace,
but evil’s a habit you can’t ever erase.

Horror’s my bride, she wears a shroud.
Together we fuck beneath thunder and cloud.
No priest can bless what was damned in the dirt.
No prayer can soften the taste of the hurt.

Graveyard reprise, maggot crown.
I rise from the rot and drag you down.
Rotting and laughing, the slasher unblessed—
I drag every heartbeat down into my chest.

Hell’s Heir

Born into chaos, a legacy sealed.
Raised in the fire, the blood I’ve spilled.
No escape from the curse in my veins.
I’ve inherited pain, inherited chains.

The devil’s son, a shadow in the light,
walking through darkness, craving the fight.
Every step I take, it pulls me in deeper.
The fire in my soul burns brighter and cheaper.

I wear the crown, but it’s forged in hell,
a king of misery, my own personal cell.
The weight of the throne, the price of control.
Sold my soul, but it’s eating me whole.

Fate whispers in my ear, I can’t outrun
the darkness that claims me, the weight of the gun.
They call me the heir, the one who’s been chosen,
but inside, I’m broken, my soul’s been frozen.

This crown is cursed, this throne’s made of lies.
I’m living in hell, can’t see through the skies.
Every promise I’ve made, every oath that I swore.
Now the blood’s on my hands, but I still want more.

The kingdom’s mine, but I’m cursed to reign.
The devil’s whisper keeps calling my name.
I wear the crown, but I can’t break free.
Hell’s heir forever, it’s all that I’ll be.

Monday’s Ghost

Clock hits six and the world turns gray.
Alarm screaming murder at the start of my day.
Cheap coffee scalds the hole in my lip.
I stare at the mirror, can’t remember shit.

My tie’s too tight, my eyes are sore.
Boss barking orders I’ve heard before.
There’s a ringing in my head that won’t let go.
Sounds like laughter, but nobody knows.

Fluorescent lights, the hum, the haze.
Emails stacking up, I forget what it says.
There’s a girl at the bar with a motel grin.
She likes broken men and the taste of my sin.

We fuck in the dark, both dead on our feet.
She calls me “baby,” leaves me weak.
I tell her my dreams taste like copper and rain.
She laughs like a ghost and asks for my name.

Punch the clock, punch the wall.
Hide the bottle, try to stall.
The room starts spinning, my hands start to shake.
That old taste of copper when I’m lying awake.

There’s something in the wallpaper scratching my brain.
Can’t remember her face but I remember the pain.
Night after night I dream I never escaped,
that house full of shadows, that voice with my shape.

The water runs rusty, the paint flakes off.
I pour myself double and I cough and I cough.
Sometimes in the morning, I swear I see red.
Just a drop on the sink, or a dream in my head.

Monday’s ghost, riding shotgun again.
Eyes in the rearview, the cracks in my grin.
Pressure keeps building, the world keeps score.
I’m just an old key rattling behind a locked door.

One more sunrise, one more bill.
I’m one bad headache from making the kill.

Nemesis

You chase absolution like it’s hiding in the dark,
rewriting conversations, dissecting every scar.
Thinking if you just explain it one more way,
it won’t feel like rot inside your brain.

You fake momentum just to slow the bleed.
Build grand intentions on rusted knees.
Blame timing, blame fate, blame the past you outgrew,
but I was always waiting—right here, in you.

You swear you’re better now, but better than what?
Every step forward is sabotage dressed up.
You reach for light like it ever belonged
to someone who breaks when the day gets too long.

I hold the matches, I drown the spark.
I make you doubt every quiet part.
And when you almost breathe like you used to believe,
I twist the knife deeper—right under the sleeve.

You call it trauma, call it fate, call it war,
but you hand me the keys when you close every door.
You look for enemies, you invent new trauma,
but they never fit, and you thrive in the drama.

Because I don’t scream—I hum in your bones.
You never had to fear me.
I was always home.

There’s no evil plot, no face to smash.
No dark-eyed stranger from a poisoned past.
There’s just me—unmoving and near.
The softest voice you always hear.

I don’t relent, I don’t forgive.
I never die—I just relive.
I mold your joy, I sculpt your dread.
I wear your skin when you wish you were dead.

No distant devil could cut like this—
because I am
my nemesis.

Never Beg

I woke up naked on the bathroom floor,
blood on my boots and a phone I don’t own.
Last night’s lipstick smeared on my ribs,
and some joker’s wallet in my coat, already cleaned out.

The mirror cracks when it tries to judge me.
I pour last week’s gin on my wounds and spit in its eye.
Somewhere outside, the world’s still eating itself,
but I’m the motherfucker with the teeth,
and I came here to fight.

Wasn’t born with a silver anything—just a fist,
and a middle finger loaded and ready for God.
Told to kneel, I learned how to grind instead.
When the vultures circled, I called them down and chewed the bones.

Never been anyone’s hero, never wanted your flag.
I fuck in alleys, I piss in the garden.
My name’s a curse scratched into bathroom doors.
If you want clean, you better look somewhere else.

Yeah, I’m ugly, but I never beg.
I burn bridges just to light my cigarette.
You want repentance, get in line.
You want a savior, get in line behind me and shove.

You prayed for rain and I brought the flood.
You prayed for mercy and I gave you blood.
There’s graffiti in my chest,
a confession carved in hunger and sweat.

I walk on razors and I never look down.
Bite my lip, taste iron.
Another night, another fight.
Still standing, still the devil in the dark,
still laughing with a mouth full of graveyard dirt.

If I die tonight, let the world stay dirty.
Let the saints drown in their own tears.
We never beg. We never crawl.
We fuck, we fight, we take it all.
We never fucking beg.

Red X

Red spray-painted X, bleeding down the splintered door,
drips fat as accusation, red as a wound that won’t clot.
Condemned stenciled in black,
the warning crawling over old scars.

The house leans in the wind, rot in its bones,
but it’s my chest that caves in,
my ribs the timbers,
my skin the peeling paint,
my spine the cracked frame.

I wear the red X across my heart,
lines crossing out every last defense.
Every sin bled through to the surface,
condemned in silent letters nobody needs to read—
they see it in the way I flinch,
the way I drift,
marked by hands that never cleaned the mess.

The city tape flaps on the stoop,
a dare, a warning, a promise:
Do not enter.
But I was born behind this door.
I sleep beneath its leaking roof,
red X still dripping,
condemned,
and still breathing.

Rotmouth Manifesto
Rotmouth drew up the manifesto
on a paper bag,
at two in the morning,
in a booth with a coffee and a drag
of something that he probably should not have been smoking,
and wrote the whole philosophy of what he saw as joking.

I

The truth is funnier than the lie.

II

The audience is smarter than the sky.

III

The bit that scares you
is the bit worth doing.

IV

The room will know exactly
what you’re pursuing.

V

The darkness earns the right to be expressed.

VI

The laugh that costs you something
is the best.

VII

Never do the bit you did last year.

VIII

The bit that fails
is still worth keeping near.

He folded up the manifesto and he lost it in the road,
somewhere between Columbus and the weight of the full load,
and rebuilt it from memory a hundred times since then,
and every time he writes it it’s slightly different again.

Every word of it is true in ways he’d never planned.
Wrinkled. Stained. Ragged.
Written with a shaking hand.

Scratched Walls and Sin Pills

There’s chalk on the mirror, numbers that scream,
a bed full of ashes where I used to dream.
Voices play poker with what’s left of my pride.
They bet with my teeth and laugh while I hide.

I dug through my chest to find my own name.
Just a note that read “Too late to blame.”
I sleep with a shovel and a phone with no line,
calling God collect one last time.

My clock bleeds backwards, time cracks like glass.
A whisper stitched needles straight into my past.
I kissed the nurse with the stitched-on grin.
Said, “Save your cure, I like the spin.”

I traded the light for a cage with lace.
Padded the walls with my mother’s face.
And laughed like hell when the sky turned in,
’cause madness knows how to make a man grin.

Scratched walls and sin pills,
dancing with my shadow on prescription hills.
I’m not alone, but no one’s real.
Screaming through a smile they taught me to feel.

Holy hallucinations with a hunger to kill.
Don’t fix me—I’ve made peace with the itch.
I’m the King of Cracked,
and I ain’t switching the glitch.

Silence Bleeds

There’s quiet in the house that clings like breath before a scream.
Air thick, moon caught in the window, shadows swollen at the seam.
You listen for the creak, for a whisper out of sight.
You know the rules—stay still, don’t look, hold tight.

But the silence is swollen, hungry as a wolf’s stare.
You feel it crawling, patient, cold fingers in your hair.
Every second is a dare, every blink a trap.
You tell yourself you’re safe, but you know better than that.

You hear nothing but the blood pulsing in your ears.
Try to hide from your shadow, but the shadow’s what you fear.
There’s red beneath your fingernails, red behind your eyes.
You pray for morning, but dawn only brings new lies.

A floorboard groans, a cold breath on your neck.
A shape in the hallway, a wet footprint you never check.
You can’t remember how you got this far, this late.
Only the taste of copper and the click of fate.

Stillness sits beside you, humming in your throat.
You feel the eyes inside the dark, the teeth behind the note.
You want to scream, but sound would only make it real.
You want to run, but the blood beneath you makes you kneel.

There’s red on your hands and red on the floor.
You thought you’d survive—
but there’s red on the door.

Silence bleeds—no hiding, no reprieve.
The house keeps its secrets, and none of us leave.
It stains every shadow, it marks every plea.
You’re part of the hush now.

Every gasp is counted, every heartbeat feeds.
You’ll drown in the quiet,
because silence bleeds.

Spite Machine

Wake up mean, blood under my nails,
ashes in my mouth, poison in my smile.
Every face on the street another target to piss on.
Cigarette breath, eyes like a car crash.

You want forgiveness? I hope you choke on the word.
Spit out your prayers, I’ll grind ’em under my heel.
Never wanted love, never bought the lie.
I get hard on the scent of burning bridges and fear.

Every handshake’s a loaded trap.
Every promise is cancer wrapped in a bow.
I paint my rage on every wall,
tag the gutters, piss in the well.

Let your saints cover their eyes, let the weak beg for mercy.
I was born to break, not build.
Shove your gold stars up your ass.
I’ll be the bullet in the back of your luck.

Sick of the liars, sick of the saints,
sick of your rules and the lies that you paint.
This world’s a coffin, I’m the worm inside.
You want me gone? Get in line.

You built your castle out of spit and lies.
I’ll piss on the moat and set the flag on fire.
Smile for the camera, it loves your tears.
Tonight, I’m the wolf and you’re the feast.

Rip out my heart, I’ll bleed black and grin.
Cut me down, I’ll crawl back in.
Wrap your pity in pretty words.
I’ll wipe my ass and flip the motherfucking bird.

Spite machine, gasoline veins.
Every grudge is fuel, every slight is a chain.
I eat hate and spit out flames.
Grit in my grin, filth in my veins.

Not a prayer, not a plea,
just the world on its knees.
Spite machine, and I’m running hot.
Watch me burn.

Static in the Walls

The clock on the stove blinks 12:00, a midnight that never ends.
Mom slams a plate, the dog slinks away.
Dad’s boots thump—
he’s coming through the kitchen.
He’s always coming.

“Don’t look at me like that.”
“Wipe that smirk off your face.”
“You hear me, boy? Don’t you walk away.”
The words push through like smoke under the door,
heavy, gray, curling up the walls.
I can’t tell where the threat ends and the silence begins.

“Shut your rotten mouth.”
“Rotten spoiled piece of shit.”
He leans in close, stubble scraping,
eyes bloodshot, voice thick as mud—
“You’re in my house. Don’t forget it.”
His hand on the back of my neck,
not hard, but tight enough.
I smell beer and burnt food and old anger.

Mom’s in her corner with a cracked coffee mug,
eyes red, voice flat,
her own set of broken-record lines—
“Just let it go. Don’t start with him.”
“Can’t you just shut up for once?”
Her face never quite in focus,
shadowed, warped by tears she never spills.
“If you’d just behave, he wouldn’t…”
“Don’t make him angry.”
“Don’t make it worse.”

Every meal tastes like ash and apology.
Forks scrape, nobody chews.
I hold my breath and memorize the escape routes.
The back door, the window,
the dreams that turn to ash before dawn.

All the words run together in a haze.
I lose count, lose sense, lose time.
TV fuzz and the drone of the fridge,
and always the static,
always the static through the walls.

Sometimes he’s soft—
the way a knife is soft before it slides in.
“You know I work hard for you.”
“You think you’re tough? You ain’t tough.”
“Go ahead. Run. I’ll drag you back.”

Years stack up like empty bottles behind the shed.
Nothing thrown out, nothing forgiven.
The same old games, the same old scars.
My mouth is shut, jaw clenched tight—
words left unsaid grind my teeth to dust.

He stands in the doorway,
blocking out the last bit of light.
His voice is a storm that never leaves town.
“You’re in my house. Don’t you ever forget.”
“You’ll never leave.”

The echo follows me everywhere,
under my skin,
between my ribs,
a heartbeat of static that never goes quiet.

I stopped answering back years ago.
I still hear every word.
Static through the walls.
It never stops.

Shut your rotten mouth.
Rotten rotten rotten.
Rotting.
Rotmouth.

Stillness

There’s a hush in these rooms that was never there before.
Floorboards silent, air heavy, shadows pressed to every door.
You hold your breath and the dark holds you tighter.
Waiting for the world to move, but nothing gets lighter.

Every sound’s a question you don’t want to answer.
You count the seconds, feel the heartbeat stutter.
The clock keeps its secrets, the fridge hums low.
You try not to look at the places you know you shouldn’t go.

You flick the lights on, check every room twice,
but the silence follows, patient as ice.
You feel something watching from just out of view.
Every mirror is deeper than you ever knew.

You press your hands to your ears, hope to block out the noise,
but the quiet just grows, swallowing your voice.
You wish for morning, for laughter, for proof,
but all you have is the hush, and the sense of the truth.

You want to believe there’s nothing there,
but the quiet keeps pulling, tugging at your hair.
You lock every window, turn music up loud,
but stillness presses closer, erasing the sound.

Stillness isn’t empty—stillness is awake.
It’s the promise of footsteps you know you didn’t make.
It’s every fear you whispered when you thought you were alone.
It’s the shiver at your shoulder, the chill inside your bones.

Stillness never leaves, it just waits and it learns.
It knows every secret, every ache, every lie.
It waits with a patience that never runs dry.
Stillness sits beside you, breathing under your bed.

Synthetic Pathogen Design

The laboratory floor reflects a cold and clinical white.
I weave the strands of slaughter in the middle of the night.
No natural mutation could achieve this perfect sting.
I am the secret architect of every dying thing.

I strip the ancient sequences and splice the jagged code,
preparing every human lung to finally explode.
The glass is thin and fragile between the world and my design.
I’m drinking down the power like a vintage heavy wine.

A protein-coated bullet aimed at every beating heart.
A masterpiece of agony I’m tearing wide apart.

I watch the liquid simmer in the silver centrifuge,
a microscopic army for a massacre so huge.
It bypasses the marrow and it bypasses the bone,
a solitary predator that hunts the world alone.

I imagine every city turning into a morgue,
a biological correction for the carbon-heavy forge.
The symptoms are a cascade of fluid and of flame,
a sudden punctuation mark that doesn’t have a name.

I’m lacing up the future with a calculated rot,
feeding every single thing the evolution forgot.

The vent is humming softly as I prep the final phase,
watching the society dissolve into a haze.
The morning sun is hitting on the stainless steel door.
I see a single drop of death upon the sterile floor.

The airlock is a gateway to a silent empty street
where every single person is a pile of rotting meat.
I’ll walk into the sunlight with the vial inside my hand
and plant the seeds of silence in this weary broken land.

The spiral is a ladder leading down into the grave.
There isn’t any algorithm left for me to save.
I’m engineering darkness in a pressurized room,
designing the delivery of a universal doom.

I spill the liquid on the dirt and watch the air begin to turn,
leaving every single bridge and every single house to burn.

Teeth First

This isn’t redemption, this isn’t a plea.
This is rage with no filter, no peace left in me.
I bite before talking, I bruise before I beg.
My mercy is missing, my hope is dead.

You want forgiveness? I want your skin.
You want to reason? I just want to win.
Every bridge you burned, I’ll piss on the ash.
Every grudge you left, I’ll wear like a mask.

I’m not your hero, I’m not your regret.
I’m the ache in your shoulder, the scar you don’t forget.
You can cry for the past, but the past isn’t kind.
It’s a blade in my hand, and I’m losing my mind.

I’ll wreck your illusions, I’ll break every bone.
I’ve lived in the silence, I’ve built my own throne.
You wanted a savior, you got a disease.
Now I’m the nightmare you’ll never appease.

I don’t need forgiveness, I don’t need peace.
I want the sound of your begging to finally cease.
I am the violence, I am the howl.
You want a story? Here’s how it ends now.

I go in teeth first, no mercy, no pause.
I live for the bruises, I kill for the cause.
If you want to break me, you better be cursed.
You get one thing from me—
my teeth first.

Rotmouth.
Rot fucking mouth.

Teeth Out

You smile and the whole room bends, my gut twists
the rage ascends, You rise in the light
I just stall and sink, You raise your glass
I just watch and drink, You stand there feasting
while I just crawl and wait.

I watch, I burn, I want Your turn.
I want your teeth out on the floor, White chips
red smear, you can’t talk anymore
You talk like you earned that throne
I want your jaw thrown, cold and alone.

You brag about winning, I just stare at the cost
You strut and you choke on the feeling you lost
You preach and you shine while I leer from the side
I’m waiting to taste the black rot you hide.
I twitch, you grin, I taste Your sin.

I want your teeth out on the floor
No more pretty story pouring from that door
You live like the world loves your sound
I want one punch To shut you down.
No knives, no gun, Just fist, one run, One swing
one crack, Your smile Turned black.

I want your teeth out on the floor, Broken chorus
no encore, You fed on my hunger, wore it like art
I want one hit Right through your heart.
You beam. They cheer. I clench. Next year.

Thanatosis

Rigor mortis sets in from the jaw,
the first joint to stiffen in the law
of the postmortem, the muscles locking down
in the calcium flood, the body turned to stone.

The eyelids will not close. The hands are fists.
The knees are locked and the forensic lists
note the time by the stiffening, the clock
written in the rigor of the biological lock.

Livor mortis follows: the blood pools at the lowest point,
the gravity of death coloring every joint
that sits below the center line, the lividity
a purple map of the position and the rigidity.

The skin goes slack after the rigor passes through,
the muscles softening again but this time into something new,
a laxity that nothing living has, a looseness born
of every protein in the body being torn
apart by the enzymes that no longer have a leash.

The body after death performs its final act,
the stiffening, the discoloring, the matter-of-fact
procedure of the shutting down, methodical and slow,
and the thanatosis is the body’s curtain call, the show.

He looked like he was sleeping.
That is what they always say.
He was not sleeping.
He was stiff as lumber and the color of a bruise.

The Backyard Burial

Every child buries things
in the backyard dirt.
Dead birds, time capsules,
the small ceremonies of growing up.

But what I buried at seven
was not a bird and not a capsule.
It was something I found in the basement
that I knew instinctively should not be seen.

Small and wet and still.
Wrapped in a dishcloth.
Carried to the apple tree at dusk
and buried with a stick for a headstone.

I did not tell my parents.
I did not tell anyone.
I sealed that memory the way I sealed the earth,
pressing it down with both palms.

The backyard burial was thirty-three years ago,
and the apple tree has grown around it.
The backyard burial was supposed to stay buried,
but roots push everything upward eventually.

I went back this year.
The tree is enormous now.
And from the trunk, at about four feet,
something is emerging from the bark.

Not pushing out, growing out.
Incorporated into the wood.
Adopted by the root system
and carried upward through the heartwood.

It is bigger now than when I buried it.
The tree has been feeding it for decades.
And what emerges from the bark
is not what I put in the ground.

The new owners of the house
say the apples taste strange this year.
Meaty, they said, almost savory.
Like the tree is fruiting something different.

And in the split of the trunk,
where the bark has peeled away,
there is a face
with features I recognize.

Because I put them there
when I was seven years old.
And the tree has spent thirty-three years
giving them back.

The Blackened Heart

In the dark, I feel the burn,
a twisted soul, with no return.
The shadows crawl inside my chest,
a blackened heart that never rests.

The blood runs cold, the pain is clear.
The whispers in my mind, they’re near.
I try to scream, but I’m too far gone.
The blackened heart is my only song.

The soul is crushed, the spirit’s torn.
I was born in fire, now I mourn.
The weight of sorrow fills the air.
The blackened heart is all I wear.

The silence calls, but I can’t hear.
The darkness swallows, feeding on fear.
There’s no escape, no way to start.
The blackened heart will tear apart.

The blackened heart, it beats no more,
lost to the darkness, broken and raw.
No redemption, no love, no light.
The blackened heart, forever in night.

The blackened heart, it lies alone.
Forgotten, forsaken, in a tomb of stone.

The Bloat

Three days in and the abdomen begins to swell,
the bacteria that once served the living now compel
the gut to feast upon itself, the gases building pressure
against the dermis, tight as a balloon of leisure

gone grotesque, the methane and the hydrogen sulfide
pushing at the seams of what was once a man with pride,
and the bloating is the body becoming its own dirigible,
a swollen monument to the perishable.

The skin goes marbled green, the veins a roadmap of the rot,
the tongue protruding from the swollen face, a blood clot
of the purple-black variety pushing past the teeth,
and the eyes are pressurized from something pushing underneath.

The smell arrives before the visual confirms the worst,
the sweetness of the putrefaction, sickly, cursed,
a candy-store corruption that the nose will never purge,
and the bloat continues expanding on its posthumous surge.

The bloat, the body inflating with its own decay.
The bloat, the gut bacteria having their buffet.
The body is a party and the bacteria are the guests,
and the bloat is the after-hours when the host comes to rest.

They found the body on day five.
The belt had split.
The shirt was taut as a drum.
The face was unrecognizable.
Just the swelling and the smile.

The Bloody Trail

A summer’s day at Camp Redwood,
where laughter rings and joy abounds,
but beneath the sunlit surface lies
a secret buried in the grounds.

A killer stalks the unsuspecting,
with a blade as sharp as winter’s chill,
and in the night, the campers vanish,
lost to the shadows of the hill.

Blood-red footprints mark the trail,
a path of horror through the trees.
Where once was heard the song of birds,
now whispers haunt the summer breeze.

Each step a tale of terror spun,
each mark a life cut short too soon.
A summer camp turned hunting ground,
beneath the pale and silent moon.

Hide if you must, but the blood will find its way.
For in the heart of Camp Redwood,
no one lives to see the day.

The Bloody Trail remains a scar,
upon the land and in the mind,
a warning to the brave who dare
to leave their innocence behind.

The Descent

Each step slick with rain, each shadow stretched tight.
The air hangs heavy, thick with breath not my own.
The railing is cold, traced by trembling hands,
a spiral into depths where no light stands.

Devoured by darkness, swallowed in gloom.
The walls sweat secrets, the air hums low.
Water drips in a patient refrain,
a rhythm of time, of passage, of pain.

No stars to guide, no path in view.
Only the weight of each step that falls.
Perhaps this descent has no final stair,
no bottom to find, no end to compare.

An endless spiral through shadow and self.
Still, I go forward, still I descend,
for in this abyss, something calls—
a voice beyond sight, beyond these walls.

I will know what lies within.
But until that moment, I walk alone.

The Haunting of Sleepy Hollow

On a foggy night in Sleepy Hollow,
a figure with a head to borrow,
stumbling through the mist, it calls my name.
I know this town is never the same.

The trees are whispering with a mournful sigh.
They warned me, but I didn’t listen, why?
Now I’m trapped in this nightmare zone,
a ghost with a grudge and a heart of stone.

I see the flash of a severed head,
held high in the air by a rider dead.
His eyes are empty, his hands are cold.
His story’s been told, but it’s never grown old.

The wind screams like a tortured soul.
This place, this curse, it takes its toll.
The ghostly rider is coming for me,
and there’s no escape from this misery.

His horse rides faster, the gallop’s near.
My heartbeat echoes, raw with fear.
His eyes are empty, but they burn like fire,
drawing me closer, pulling me higher.
The trees close in, I feel the dread,
the chilling whispers of the dead.

So beware the night in Sleepy Hollow,
where the dead come to play, they’ll follow.
There’s no escaping the curse you’ve seen.
Once you’re here, you’re part of their dream.

The House Feeds

The house waits hollow, wood swollen underneath the rain.
Walls packed tight with whispers, old blood in the grain.
You step inside, think it’s dust on your skin,
but the shiver you feel is the fear locking in.

Each room remembers every scream, every plea.
Painted over, papered up, but it never sets you free.
Windows look out, but the glass doesn’t see.
It’s a mouth swallowing light, and the hunger is in me.

You count every heartbeat, hear footsteps not yours.
See shapes in the mirrors, hear claws in the doors.
Your voice gets smaller, your memory thins.
You search for a window, but the darkness grins.

Something in the attic crawls under your skin.
A weight on your chest that wants to get in.
It whispers of others, of teeth and regret.
You wonder who vanished, but you’re not out yet.

Somewhere beneath you, the bones still remember
the echo of footsteps, the cold of December.
You thought you’d escape, you thought you’d get out,
but the house never questions, the house never doubts.

The house that eats doesn’t sleep, doesn’t shout.
It feeds in the silence, it won’t spit you out.
You came here hoping for something to keep.
Now you’re just another secret
the house eats in its sleep.

It will keep you forever, with all the rest.
The house that eats only wants what’s left.

The Last Laugh

We watch the world burn, but we’re still here.
Drowning in ashes, but we don’t fear.
The skies may fall, but we’ll stand tall.
In the face of chaos, we still crawl.

The city lights flicker, but they’re dead.
The last screams echo, but they’re all misled.
We’ve lost our way, but we’re not lost.
We’ll sell our souls at any cost.

Hell’s been calling, but we’re still alive.
On the edge of madness, we thrive.
The dark’s our home, the fire’s our friend.
We’ll burn it all down, no fear of the end.

The last laugh, it’s all we need
to keep on walking through this plague of greed.
The last laugh, we’ll never stop.
We’ll rise from the wreckage, and laugh from the top.

The Pale Throne of Mastema

Choked up on battery acid hallucinations,
cemetery mutts howling from beneath the old floorboards,
blood dries on the pillow, ink crawls through the veins.
I cross out each Sunday, box every filth-stained regret.

The saints are shrieking from under the tiles,
Mom’s ghost pouring bleach in the bathwater,
fists stay buried in pockets, one finger stroking the blade.
Every word tastes like cold grave dust.

Mastema’s eyes flicker from the gutter’s reflection,
split coins glinting with spoiled resurrections.
He hands me a ledger, pages tacky with hunger,
demands I pay out what’s festering under my tongue.

Night’s a fresh contract, each whisper a plea.
He’s humming dead psalms beneath my rotten teeth for free.
Reflection is twitching, desperate to vanish,
but Mastema’s ticking off failures and the darkness is endless.

I beg for mercy, but the choir is bone and rot.
Candles burn black in a chapel strangled by weeds.
Mastema sits grinning on a throne of unpaid debts,
tallying the bargains I tried to bury and leave.

Prayers fall like receipts, soaked in spit and cheap bourbon.
I stumble backward through the years, clinging to threads.
Every grave is a mirror, every mirror a threat.
Scratch out the history—he just sharpens the blade.

He drags up the secrets, lays them out on cold dirt,
turns hope into splinters, every memory to hurt.
No forgiveness waiting, no exit to run,
just the steady drumbeat of my pulse coming undone.

Tonight I’m stripped raw before the tallyman’s throne,
every false belief, every guilt I’ve outgrown.
He lifts up my shadow—ruined, writhing, untrue—
I see the same crooked smile, and know I’m through.

Let the ledger ignite, let the bones turn to dust.
Let the last word be silence, let the silence combust.
I traded away flesh, traded thought and last breath,
to the king of the scraps when you bargain with death.

Mastema’s still laughing as the dawn fails to rise,
counting the endings behind feral, lidless eyes.
His fingers entwine, and the world splits apart.
Rotmouth dissolves, but Mastema keeps my heart.

The Purge

The body purges at the orifices first,
the fluids seeking exit from the biological worst
of the decomposition timeline, every opening a door
for the liquid evidence of what the body held before.

The nose, the mouth, the ears, the places where the living
once received the world now doing the posthumous giving
back of everything the body borrowed from the earth,
a purging that inverts the process of the birth.

The coroner has seen a thousand purges and can tell
the hour of the death by the consistency and smell
of what the body has released, the viscosity a clock
that ticks in secretions and in every postmortem shock.

The mattress underneath is ruined past all salvation,
the purge has soaked through every layer of the foundation
of the bed where someone slept and then stopped sleeping,
and the body is doing what the body has been keeping
in reserve for this exact occasion.

The purge, the body returning what it took.
The purge, the final chapter of the book
written in the fluids of the dead.
And the purge leaves nothing but the bone and the bed.

They flipped the mattress.
It soaked through both sides.
They threw it in the dumpster.
The stain remained on the floor.

The Rot Begins in the Gut
The stomach acid burns through its own wall at hour six,
the enzymes that digested dinner now digest the fix
of the body that produced them, the autodigestion starting
in the cavity where the bacteria are charting

their escape from the intestinal, the great migration
of the gut flora colonizing every station
of the body that once housed them as a guest,
and the rot begins in the gut because the gut knows best.

The pancreas dissolves itself, the liver follows suit,
the bile spilling free to stain the tissue at the root
of every organ system that once functioned as a team,
and the body is unraveling at every seam.

The lungs go spongy, soft, collapsing inward on the frame,
the heart becomes a bag of clot that no longer has a claim
on the blood it used to circulate with mechanical precision,
and the rot proceeds with democratic indecision

about which organ to swallow whole next.

We are all digesting ourselves.
Right now. While alive.
The difference is we keep up with the damage.
Death is just falling behind.

The Shield of the Forgotten

Hands carve sigils into the empty air,
shaping light from the dark unseen.
The sky is thick with fire,
the earth split wide where steel has screamed,
yet he does not flinch, does not bow,
though the void itself has schemed.

Forged from whispers of the ancients,
from the weight of the buried earth,
each symbol hums, each letter sings,
bound in fire and sacred script.
It meets the barrier, shatters in sparks,
a curse cut short, a stolen breath.

It collides, recoils, breaks apart,
turned to dust before the climb.
Still, they come, with claws and steel,
with hunger thick in hollow eyes.
For this is not just magic wrought,
not just power’s fleeting thread.

This is the will of every soul who fell before but never fled.
Of all who fought, of all who bled,
who faced the dark and stood alone.

So let the war cry sound again,
let the storm of ruin rise.
The shield will stand, a testament,
against the dark, against the lies.
The sorcerer will lower his hands
and walk beyond the battlefield’s door.

The Smell That Stays

It stays in the carpet. It stays in the wood.
The smell of the decomposition stood
its ground against the bleach, the enzyme cleaners,
the ozone machines and the professional demeanors
of the crime scene crew who told me they could get it out.

But the smell that stays is the smell of doubt
that anything is ever truly clean once the body
has leaked its contents through the hotly
contested territory of the living room floor.

I can taste it on the air when the humidity is high,
the sweet corruption rising from beneath the alibi
of the renovation, the new paint, the new hardwood.
And the smell that stays lives in the neighborhood.

Maybe the actual molecule embedded in the beam
of the joists that soaked the fluid up, absorbed the extreme
concentration of the human rendered liquid by the heat.
And the smell that stays has outlasted every cleaning feat.

I sold the house. The new owners called me twice.
The smell came back in summer with the warmth and the precise
efficiency of the decomposition that occurred
in the living room where the body went unheard.

The smell that stays after everything is scrubbed,
the smell that stays after the carpet has been rubbed
raw and replaced and the subfloor treated twice.
The smell that stays does not care about the price.

Three owners later.
They all call.
The same complaint.
The house remembers.
The wood remembers.
The smell remembers.

The Underneath

I walk like nothing’s wrong, keep my voice controlled.
Hands steady, eyes straight, every weakness on hold.
But there’s something twitching in the corners of my calm,
something sharp behind my quiet, pressing from the dark.

I play normal—go to work, shake hands, laugh on cue.
But there’s a heat inside my chest that’s always burning through.
Every word rehearsed, every story trimmed.
But under it all, something claws and grins.

It waits when I’m quiet, paces in my skull.
Whispers in the silence, when the daylight dulls.
It’s there in the twitch I pretend’s just a cough,
in the urge to break things, or just take off.

I wash my hands, I lock the doors, I check the lights.
But nothing I do can hold it back at night.
It’s not a ghost, not a wound you can see.
It’s the part of me that isn’t me.

Some nights I give in, let the mask slip down.
Feel it stretch my face, hear it in my sound.
I close my eyes and almost let go,
but I remember tomorrow, and nobody knows.

Underneath my skin, behind my teeth,
something hungry moves, something breathes.
I smile for the world, keep my secrets deep,
but the monster in my bones doesn’t sleep.

Underneath the quiet, underneath the skin,
there’s a monster naming terror, wearing my own grin.
I keep the mask, I keep the smile,
but in the dark, I reconcile.

I am not alone, never free—
there’s something living underneath.
And it’s got teeth.
And it’s got me.

Underneath the Red on the Door

You lock the windows, double-check the latch.
Lights flicker, heart pounds, shadows crawl across the glass.
You hear footsteps echo on tile, slow and sure.
Sweat beads your skin as silence floods the floor.

You tell yourself it’s nothing, just a creak, just a breeze,
but you feel it—something moves, you forget how to breathe.
Outside, the world sleeps, but the dark never rests.
You pray for the sun but tonight’s not done yet.

There’s red on the door and you know it’s for you.
Heavy breath in the hallway, metal glinting through.
Don’t bother screaming—no one’s awake.
I’m coming for the fear you can’t fake.

Keys drop, lights snap, you freeze on the stairs.
The walls close in, I’m already there.
Floorboards remember every secret you’ve spilled.
Tonight you pay for the wish to be thrilled.

Heartbeat pounding, you can taste the copper heat.
My hand at your throat, your pulse skips a beat.
The blade isn’t mercy, the mask isn’t kind.
You see what you are in the flash of my mind.

You never believed in monsters until tonight.
Now you’re praying for silence, begging for light.

There’s red on the door and you know it’s for you.
Final breath stolen, nothing you can do.
I was the whisper, the knife, the stare—
the last thing you feel is the chill of the air.

Under the mask,
it’s always goodbye.

When Gods Go Starving

Rotmouth stares through the shatter in the glass,
ten thousand voices spitting nails in his brain.
Halo cracked, horns splitting bone.
Every prayer tastes like poison, every curse feels like home.

There’s an angel in his marrow, screaming “hold the line,”
but the devil behind his teeth grins and pours the wine.
Sanity’s a rumor in the back of his head.
Madness a mother’s touch, cold and well-fed.

Every dream’s a cage, every hope’s a knife.
God counting sins, Satan betting on the strife.
Inside, cathedrals collapse and temples burn.
Seraphim and serpents trading scars for turns.

Rotmouth spits up iron, blood’s old and black.
His hands won’t stop shaking, his shadow looks back.
Divinity and darkness wrestle in his sleep.
Every heartbeat’s judgment, every silence runs deep.

The world splits sideways, his mind’s gone jagged.
The choir of memory chants in tongues ragged.
God’s on his knees, Satan’s biting through chains,
both begging Rotmouth for the keys to his pain.

No one’s left pure, no one gets out.
Virtue and vice circling round and round.
He rips out his own tongue, silences the crowd.
Let the thunder decide, let the dark be loud.

Shadows fuck angels in the chapel of bones.
Saviors and sinners all gnawing on stones.
Sanity’s last sermon drowned in static and rust.
Divinity’s just dust, insanity’s just trust.

When gods go starving, they gnaw on the soul.
Tear down the sun, leave nothing whole.
Sanity weeps, insanity grins,
both locked in the cellar with their original sins.

When gods go starving, it’s just flesh and fear.
I am the ending, the last thing you hear.
When gods go starving, the world comes undone.
Two monsters devoured, and no one has won.

Ashes to hunger, prayers to bone.
Inside the silence, he’s finally alone.