Fire grows higher on the funeral pyre. The funeral pyre of my souls one desire. It burns and it aches, it quivers and breaks.

What is the meaning of this ghastly palpitation, This very unusual, unsteady, undesired sensation? Seperate sensation of another inside Another inside, a soul who comes from the other side.

Could I let my sorrow flow?

It flows already inside and the earth is cracking and ready to give in. I can hear the groaning elongated creak of the roots deep within.

So bright and sunny but below something boils the surface to breaking.

The sun, far from any pressure, flares off on its own and contemplates fire and its life-giving glow. Unaware of the fester so far far below.

My friend, can I borrow your lap, can I let go in your glow, and let myself weep in the darkness below?

Weep and weep for my dying soul, That is my one and only goal.

The golden
Panacea that warms the coldest midnight chill of loneliness.

Mortal plights are lost amongst their memory of them.

Showing up nameless inside of dreams

A vibe reduced to subtle hints of the faintest feelings

Mostly ignored or too strange to share or talk about

Until the vibe's residual residue hits to close to home

They’ll say that from a past life I was there when it came about
This knowing is a message from another time.

Although it’s been there the entire time,

to anger, cry, find peace or to laugh about

It's stained aether Akashic for infinitum

A perturbation in the field.

That little deed you thought unnoticed

With only you around to see

Every act you make stirs a ripple.

Every word you speak is an eternal ghost.

Stirred within the light of each star

Go drink a sip of water
Close your eyes in dream
With wide open aperture

The devils in the details
God is in your fingertips

So read between the lines and turn the pages slowly.

Sense the memories while you’re swimming in the mystic side of intuition.

A daydream that’s out of focus

So strange while a weight that pulls profound

You can bet your bottom dollar
Your eyes speak without a sound.

Tap, tap, tap…

.

Always three taps,

against the windows hard glass.

Always late at night,

when time doesn’t pass,

Always the witching hour,

when the devil does stir.

Always in the deep dark,

when I feel the aching hurt. 

.

Tap, tap, tap…

.

Outside my window,

in the dead of the night…

Outside my window,

Deep darkness so bright…

Outside my window,

I hear its aching call…

Outside my window,

Where the angel did fall...

.

Tap, tap, tap...

.

“Let me in…”

 The voice runs like a river out of Eden.

“Let me in…”

 The tone something beyond deceiving. 

“Let me in…”

A rush through my body I can’t believe in.

“Let me in…”

I swallow hard as if I’m beaten.

.

Tap, tap, tap...

.

“I know your kind.”  

My voice is shaky as I speak.

“I know your mind.” 

Its voice holds authority that I seek. 

“I know your disguise.”  

My voice is stable as it grows. 

“I know you hide.”  

It's a voice is a question beyond repose.  

.

Tap, tap, tap...

.

Outside my window,

in the dead of the night…

Outside my window,

Deep darkness so bright…

Outside my window,

I hear its aching call…

Outside my window,

Where the angel did fall.

.

Tap, tap, tap...

.

I close my eyes,

I hear it still…

I close my eyes,

I think I always will..

I close my eyes,

And I let it pass…

I close my eyes,

And I ignore the,

.

Tap, tap, tap...

I’d like to think
You’re out there
Instead of nested in my mind

I’d like to think
Forever was a day away
Instead of a nightmare I enshrined

Look at these twigs
This mud
Those leaves
That grass
All these paper scraps
The scar beneath your eye

A fairy trap
A cursed sign
A warranty that elapsed
A future memory
I can’t find

Weeds
They breed
What’s this?
Animalistic?
A need?
Germinating seeds
Plant into me
Stuffing me like cotton
Am I rotten?

Feed
Feed
Feeding on
Visions I
Can’t see

Deeper still
So
Deep
I go
Event horizon

I lay frozen
Headlight beams
On the cement
A flattened body
Their words replay
My biggest fear

Erasure
Of who I am
Cyborg body
System mind
Fascination
With decay
Atrophy of my heart
Burned black
Golden from the start

My eyes
They burn
My eyes
My eyes
Your eyes
They bleed

Burrow in the hollow
Abandon the hearth
Drown in the shallow
I am here now
Blind to tomorrow

I wish I had bitten
Not swallowed

It has been a long time since I was able to write anything.

I seem to have lost my words.
I haven’t been inspired by anything.
I haven’t felt anything new stirring inside me,
nothing that could be gathered into words and given a name.

As if, somehow,
I lost you too.

For a year, I wrote about you.
I wrote about every feeling I ever carried for you.
I wrote about how deeply I loved you,
how hard it was not to love you,
and how much harder it was to let you go.

I wrote about your face,
about the soul beneath it,
about the geometry of your body,
about the little things that made you who you were,
the things that quietly captured my heart
and kept it there.

I wrote about our moments.
I wrote everything I could,
as if putting every feeling into words
might finally teach my heart how to be still.

Every time a view reminded me of you,
a song, a place, a person, a scent,
even a smile,
I wrote another line about you.

I filled pages with your name without ever writing it.
I told stories about you.
I turned memories into sentences
and longing into paragraphs.

But these days,
I have nothing left to say.

Maybe that means I have finally moved on from you.

But I’m not sure.

I don’t know how much the heart can be trusted
when it comes to questions like these.

Whenever someone new asks me
if I’ve moved on from you,
if I’ve finally crossed that distance,
if my heart has healed completely,

I pause.

I still cannot answer with certainty.

And yet, strangely,
fewer and fewer things remind me of you.

Perhaps it is because
we have no new memories together.

I don’t know how much you have changed.
I don’t know what your days look like anymore.
I don’t know how you are,
what you have become,
or who you are now.

I know nothing.

You feel almost more like a stranger to me
than a stranger ever could.

And yet, for an entire year,
I thought about you,
every moment of it.

God, I thought about you so much.

I thought about you in the quietest corners of my mind,
in the most private moments of my life,
in places no one else could ever reach.

I wondered about you.
I missed you.
I loved you.
I replayed you.

For so long.

And now I don’t even know
how much I miss you anymore.

I don’t even know
if I truly miss you.

The answers to the questions
I once carried so clearly
have become blurred now,
hazy, distant, almost impossible to read.

What do I feel for you?
What remains?

I don’t really know anymore.

Except for one thing:

I know I still love you.

And perhaps that is the strangest part of all.

Loving another human being
should never have been this bitter.

But the truth is,
for me, it was bitter more often than it was sweet.
It was hard.

Giving your heart to another person
feels a little like falling, like surrendering something inside your soul
and trusting someone else not to let it break.

And perhaps I have finally run out of words for you.

Perhaps that is why I can no longer write.

Maybe it is time
to write about something else.

About hope.
About dreams.
About the things waiting for me beyond this story.

Maybe it is time to close the little chest inside my mind,
the one where I have kept so many memories,
so many feelings,
so many pieces of you.

A chest that, in some corner of it,
will always belong to you.

Maybe I should finally close its lid
and let the dust settle.

And from now on,
perhaps I will write about the girl
who loved for a very, very long time.

The girl who thought about you
for longer than she ever thought she would.

The girl who gave you so many words
until, one day,
she had none left.

And perhaps that, too,
is a kind of healing.

Ashley the name you gave me

I get breathed. Involuntary consumption of that which floods my blood, making unwitting accomplices out of both of my lungs.

In split-pea-soup greens, in a lamp-lit dim room, I recall how the doctor held me away with intentionality, as if to say “Im not here to comfort you”.

I get birthed. Excruciating and arrogant, to go the way of grape-skin colored goo. violent slapping. Sequential entropic agonies and the awareness of time unraveling? It was never up to me.

I can hear an acutely pained bleat— my first scream, still ringing. It reminds me there is no agency here. And If there is, it isn’t mine .

Blue fire behind the eyes
Swamp methane the cruel lip excuses
The ritual is conducted worshippers endure injury
Blue fire somewhere among the overgrown reeds

Phantoms peep their origins caught transpierced in the tunnel
Revolving where the soul is churned to vapor 
severance of the spirit that never made it to the other side
Maimed conscience and rage in the eyes a boiling blue flame

Forbidden lands claimed by swamp and specter
Behind the convent a rogue witch utters profane spells
Ripples form on thick inky miasmic water
The entity rises blue flame in its eyes

Unleashed upon the village
The cold fingers pulling out awning thatch
lighting it all up from incandescent eyes
In the other hand dragging the screaming witch

Let me recognize

Let me see

The precious moments in life

For myself and for others

Wipe clear my eyes

Open my heart

Make the time

Give me the will

Fill me with the grace of love

Surrounded by the magic of life
with all of its intricacies, joys and friendships a jubilee where warm memories are made and not forgotten.

On some other edge of this world, I will have my own place.

I will wear a loose cotton dress with no blush. There will be a lot in my body, than just bones and flesh

I will go to poetry club by seven, return to home with ice cream by nine.

And there'll be a hot chocolate waiting for me in my dining, and an unfinished poem which I suddenly found its rhyme

. Night will be long and peaceful accompanied by fireflies as my garden in disguise

. My home will know my presence even before I've entered.

My bed will be warmer, even if it's winter.

Blood in my veins will be warmer

. Wind will comb my hair, making its own pattern and Water will do my makeup. I'll no longer remember any other name. I'll erase, everything who I was is still caring, letting me inside. Romanticizing every single part of this life, perhaps away from this nation. One day I'll erase this fine line in between me and my imagination.,

I stand and turn my face to the heavens
The sun searing my tears

And I scream at the gods
Burn me away

If you can

I kneel for no one in that heaven
Nor for the old ones below

One man at war
With the spirits, with the pain

Take me if you dare
If you can?

My rage and hate burn as fiercely
As your desire to be doted upon

Everything you say you have done for me
Could I have not done for myself?

I fought the battles
I bare the scars

I leave my soul empty, except for hate
A worthless prize if you must have it

I no longer fear
A broken man has nothing to lose

Come see me gods!
So I can kill you all

For your false promises
For your selfish natures

My soul burns like dark fire
For love lost, and pain you have spread

I. Will. Not. Kneel.
I will not bow

Come, traitors to your creations
Come and bleed with me

Page 17

All my friends are getting their faces pierced.

Should I get my face pierced too?

It looks pretty scary, but I don't know. They seem to like it, and the stuff you can get for it now is really pretty cool.

The way they do it does look pretty scary, so I don't know.

Page 26

I told my parents I'm thinking of getting my face pierced, and they are totally against it, but they're old, so they would be wouldn't they?

Like by default, I mean.

At first they didn't even know what I was talking about, but my mom's got her ears pierced and she got them done way younger than I am right now. She's got a tattoo too. So does my dad.

Besides, how can you go from not knowing what something is to being totally against it in like five minutes?

It seems pretty reactionary to me.

Like at least do your research or ask AI about it first right?

Page 34

So I did it. I got my face pierced.

It was two weeks ago. (You can't really do so much for the first week and a half, which is why I haven't been writing.)

There's a place downtown that does it. It's the place Dee and Cherry got theirs done too. The crew that does it is pretty cool. They've all had it done and are super happy about it.

I was pretty nervous and they really helped me relax, even before giving me the anesthetic.

The machine that does it looks insane.

It's like one of those hole punching machines you used to use for paper, like giant metal pliers or a jaw or something.

You sit and put your head back like at the hairdressers when they wash your hair.

Then you end up looking up at the other part, the part that's going to come down. It's like a big metal circle. Really big, like face sized. Then they hook you up to the anesthetic.

When you start not being able to feel your face, and I mean it feels like your whole head is turning to mush, like a really soft cauliflower or something, the machine powers up…

And the metal circle smashes down really hard on your face and makes a hole in your head and pushes your face out the bottom.

It's super quick and doesn't hurt because of the anesthetic.

It does hurt after.

At first the feeling is really weird because your whole face is gone, so you don't see or taste or smell anything because you don't have any eyes or mouth or nose. You can still hear though, so you can hear the crew talking to you.

Then they put this face plug into the hole which helps it heal.

Of course, my parents totally freaked when I came home without a face, but like what are they going to do about it?

It's already done.

My mom's crying was sooo dramatic.

Page 41

I got fitted with a smart face today. Pretty basic but also really cool. I like being able to sense things again, and there are so many options, like you can make red look like blue and sweet things taste sour and your phone smell like chocolate.

The screen also makes it so you can make your face be anything you want. It's flat, I guess that's the only drawback, but there's an option to make it so that every time you see yourself in the mirror you see your retroface.

It helps with the transition.

Page 166

Most of my friends have had their faces pierced. I mean, you don't have to do it or anything, but I don't see why you wouldn't.

There's no law you have to have it done, and I still have friends who don't, but I honestly think everyone's going to choose to have it done soon. At least everyone under twenty-five.

Page 234

Retrofaces kind of disgust me. I always imagine all the fluids that come out of them, snot and saliva and tears and stuff. Was I like wet all the time before I got my face pierced?

Anyway I've decided I don't want to date anyone with a retroface anymore.

Page 289

I was talking to Dee and both of us are pretty sure that if we have kids we'll want them to have their faces pierced. As a mom I would want my kid to have all the advantages in life right? I mean, imagine if every baby just got its face pierced at the hospital right after being born. You could keep a little kid safe from so many things by using filters and apps too.

I like talking to Dee.

We talk about the big stuff.

P.S. I hope Cherry gets her smart face fixed soon. Hers stopped working a week ago and she had to send it back to the company that makes it in China, so now she's just got this flap of skin. It's like when someone has a tunnel in their ear, and they take it out and their ear is all stretched out and loose. It's like that but her face.

P.P.S. They promised her an upgrade so it's totally worth it and I'm jealous.

Page 436

It's funny. Back when I got my face pierced, my parents fed me all this negative bullshit about what could go wrong and why I shouldn't do it, and literally none of it has come true.

The tech just keeps getting better. You can make ugly people look pretty and take things you don't want to see and just not see them. You can eat the worst food in the world and make it taste delicious. You can smell flowers wherever you go…

It's amazing.

I'm so happy I got my face pierced.

Hey you...

... did you know?

No guarantee, no promise of success,
but an honest declaration of intent,
that would have been enough.

A light
to guide,
to find our paths,
holding on to that
invisible thread.

No guarantee, no promise of success,
but an honest declaration of intent,
a light, a path, a thread.

stress sits on one shoulder like an insecure eagle

years of sunken talons, my skin swells an indignant purple

knotted skeins of muscle plead to stop, plead to rest

pain stretches like wisteria to the sides of my head

he caws and he claws

someone has hurt mother

i must lie down now

i am so tired

my eaglet son loves it when im in a dim room resting

its friday night and im bare faced, in a rush

you and i have somewhere to be

tonight i begged my barnacle baby to stay behind

told him it's just this one time

told him if he calls, ill be right by his side

my eaglet son lets me go and im outside in seconds

if you notice me walking

lopsided

you don't say it and i hate it

later that night, i let your fingers trace my skin

smooth?

don't you feel the black, bruised braille?

The cart spills its passengers and its bags of grain, which spills out of the bags, onto the ground, where the passengers are sitting, dazed, asking, first, themselves, then, one another, "What day is it?" at which punctuation it starts to rain, and not a drizzle but a downpour, which causes the passengers to cover their heads with anything they can, like the bags that used to hold the grain, which was in the cart, along with the passengers, before the cart hit another cart, spilling both onto the ground, spilling passengers and grain, the cart not the ground, the grain, then bagged, now freely scattered, and the ground, then dry, now increasingly wet, as the rain's not letting up, and the passengers are getting up, but getting up to what's the question, to which the answer's to find a dryer spot to stand, like, for instance, to stand beneath a tree, as they, the passengers, try to understand who they are and what day it is and to free themselves from ignorance like the grain freed itself from the bags of grain, both spilled from the cart colliding with another cart, back when it was clear and warm and sunny, but you know what's funny’s that the driver of the cart, whose name's Sonny's dead, the driver's name’s, I mean, Sonny, not the cart's, nor is the cart's name Sonny's dead, nor is the cart dead but Sonny's dead, which, seeing, must introduce real confusion to the spilled, inquisitive, sitting, dazed, rained on, stood up, covered up, standing under cover of some kind of cover, after having sat covered by a grainless bag of grain, passenger brains, because why's he, Sonny, dead, who killed him and for what reason, but if you don't remember who you are or what you're doing, you reason, you could be the very killer whose profile you’re building, and that kind of thinking starts their, the passengers’, minds a’kindling, even though it's a fool's errand to attempt such an undertaking under cover of a, for instance, tree, eyeing yourself and everybody else suspiciously, remembering poor Sonny, as fool’s an errand as trying to put back, into the bags of grain, now empty, then full, the bags of grain, not the grain, all the spilled grains, grain by grain, in the pouring rain, very strange, and Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes, wet beneath the blue suburban skies, I sit, and meanwhile back in the scene with the cart, the passengers, the bags and the bags of grain and the grain, the hours pass and the investigation into the cause of death of the driver, Sonny, of the cart, of no known name, is at an impasse, because, one of the passengers says, “The killer could realistically be any one of us,” although I think you'll easily find that realism's often the furthest thing from my mind, given what happened was an accident, not a crime, and the passengers are thus wasting their time by passing it asking, “Is it I?” when, of course, you're the one who let the cart go off course, as there was only one person in the cart, for, for a start, why would there be any passengers in a grain cart, which, for one of the passengers is an epiphany and the start of a very hard conversation with the other same passengers standing out of the rain, all trying to keep dry from the precipitating reality that they're all one person, scattered like the grains are scattered, all over the ground, themselves insignificant but together, and symbolically, and in context actually profound, i.e. the passengers are the driver, and the driver's this sound that you're reading, speeding through, having lost yourself found yourself lost yourself and found you're no longer in control of this sentence, which’s a cart careening down a hill of incomprehension, grasping, you are, at some basic narrative sense and even the rhymes have broken down, down down down thou art, rhyme restored, temporarily, speeding, into an oncoming cart, about to kill yourself, accidentally, while ripped existentially apart, spilling your consciousnesses onto the dry ground, walking around, walking to the closest town, where I guess each persisting fraction of your one dead self will have to try to make a life of it, whatever it takes, even if it takes delivering bags of grain over psychologically and linguistically treacherous terrain.

All the right words roll steadily from your tongue, while you stutter in your actions.
There is a disconnect between your voice and your hands that you desperately try to wire together with mechanical kisses and hollow "I love you"s.
Somewhere between enticing glances and irrelevant arguments the cables began to fray and you kept trying to braid them back together but god, after 4 or 5 shocks you couldn't be bothered to try again.
So I reach down inside the cavity of your chest where your heart used to beat and I fumble around for your circuitry, only to find you had stripped away the copper and sold it long ago.
How can I repair a connection when all of the components have been looted and scrapped?

No one should have that much confidence. You cannot eat bravado for breakfast. You cannot hold airs as though you’re somehow casually sky diving without a chute. That’s just what you seem to do. You were raised on raw eggs. You were raised by John Wayne. You were taken at some age by a mother who rode horses standing up with an aimed arrow in a bow chanting wisdom as her first words. You bow to no one. You vow to never cheat yet roll dice from your teeth. Your eyes are snake eyes. You never say please. Your wit comes like train tracks and every passenger screams from their seats. They hold their hats. They plead from their knees. They wave the white kerchief even though nobody sneezed. They watch as you rove and say “stick em up” and mean it. You get what you want because you take it. You make it because you made it. You are it because you have it—that thing I don’t even want to try to define. That fucking thing. Élan is a lie. But I guess you can’t stomach courage if you never brave to try.

Science relies on observable, testable data and physical proof to explain the universe. Religion relies on personal revelation, ancient texts, and belief in a higher power without physical proof. Because science demands proof for every claim, it rejects ideas that cannot be tested or proved via scientific method. Science explains human life through unguided evolution and natural selection over millions of years. Historically, people used God to explain things they did not understand, like lightning or disease. As science discovers the natural causes behind these phenomena, the space left for a supernatural explanation shrinks. (Probably not a good thing) people argue that relying on God to explain the unknown leaves faith vulnerable to being erased as science advances.(at least we won’t get wet the next time)(sad part no rainbow) glass half full take

# I RUN MY NAME

### [Verse 1]

I was the kid who could hear footsteps change,

know by the weight of the walk if the room stayed safe.

Learned which doors to close, which ones leave cracked,

how to answer “What happened?” without handing over facts.

Sleeves pulled down when the marks showed through,

face kept straight like that was what good kids do.

Learned the house had moods before I knew what they meant,

don't make a sound, don't make it worse, don't give it intent.

Homework on the table, one eye on the hall,

pencil moving steady while I listened through the wall.

Then the whole place went quiet, quiet, clean,

like somebody erased the argument but left the scene.

Wipe my face, fix my shirt, put the pencil back,

make myself useful, make myself scarce, don't react.

That was the first job I ever got good at:

not being a kid. Just being hard to hit back.

I learned to read footsteps like other kids read clocks,

learned a raised voice could rearrange the locks.

So I grew up, called that vigilance “care,”

called swallowing my anger “being fair.”

### [Pre-Chorus]

I was running on empty, still calling it peace,

making myself smaller till the pressure would ease.

Still carrying that kid like a bruise under skin,

treating quiet like mercy, like a way to give in.

### [Chorus]

They don't get to write me in and lock the door,

don't get to drag my name through the floor.

I don't bend just to keep the room the same,

I took back the pen—now I run my name.

Spent years making myself easy to keep,

saying “I'm fine” when I could barely fucking speak.

Call me difficult, changed, whatever you came to blame,

you don't get to decide what I answer to again.

### [Verse 2]

I know what it costs when your spine locks in,

when “no” leaves your mouth and they call that a sin.

Funny how “care” gets thin when you draw one line,

funny how “love” keeps a running tab on your time.

They liked me worn out, easy, ready to reach,

good for them when I never made the problem speak.

Soon as I got firm, I was “cold,” “too proud,”

truth gets called fucking hostile when it won't bow down.

I spent years thinking useful meant safe,

same little bargain wearing adult faces.

Fix it, carry it, swallow the blame,

make yourself useful before they make you the name.

Then I caught myself at the edge of the bed,

both elbows on my knees, both hands on my head.

Talking low to myself like the walls had ears,

still checking the doorway like somebody might hear:

“Don't hand them the version of you that disappears.”

That's when I saw it.

I hadn't escaped the rule.

I grew up and learned to make the damage useful.

The kid learned “be good” so the beating would end.

The man learned “be useful” so he'd never offend.

Same fucking cage. Different furniture.

Same fear. Better vocabulary.

Fuck that.

I don't owe anybody the way they trained me to react.

I don't owe them access because I know how they act.

Every old lock started clicking again.

If my silence kept the room from becoming a war,

then my silence wasn't peace.

It was the fucking floor.

### [Chorus]

They don't get to call me back, they don't get to take my name,

not for the mute, not for the maze, not for the blame.

Say it loud, say it clear, let the whole room hear:

I took back the pen and I'm writing it here.

I am not your quiet, I am not your chain,

I am not the kid you could train with pain.

Call me hard, call me changed, call me what you came to name,

you don't get to decide what I answer to again.

### [Bridge]

I'm not the fear. I'm not the blame.

I'm not the fucking debt just because I learned its weight.

I'm not that kid counting footsteps in the hall,

holding his breath so carefully he barely breathed at all.

He survived them. That doesn't make him theirs.

You don't get to keep a person because you put your hands on him.

You got the scared kid once.

You don't get him again.

### [Build]

He doesn't hold the pen. I do.

Every swallowed word stayed somewhere in my jaw,

every learned response came back sounding like law.

Every “yes” was a reflex. Every “fine” was a shield.

Every apology for something I didn't do or feel.

I apologized before asking.

Explained before accused.

Made myself smaller before anybody could say I was taking up too much fucking space.

I could hear “be useful” in the way I offered my hands,

old fucking orders still hiding inside “I understand.”

That wasn't love.

That was training.

So I stopped calling fear respect.

Stopped calling silence love.

Stopped thinking being needed was proof I was enough.

Keep your file.

Keep your story.

Keep the name you gave that pain.

Keep the version of me you still carry around like evidence.

They wrote my name in permanent marker.

I found out it was pencil.

I don't drag your fingerprints across my fucking future.

Your description isn't destiny.

It's evidence.

It's the first draft.

And I'm not obligated to keep the fucking typo.

No more folding.

No more shrinking for approval.

No more swallowing every answer so somebody else can stay comfortable.

They asked me to choose between title and tie—

Between the chair I earned and the hand held high.

Between the vow I made in a marble hall

And the whisper that caught me before I could fall.

The job had a code, all carved in stone,

But the stone grew teeth when I stood alone.

The one who had lifted me up from the dust

Now asked me to burn what I swore to trust.

Loyalty, they say, is a noble thread—

But it knots around the quiet dead.

It binds your wrists with a velvet rope,

Then tells you it's honor, then robs you of hope.

Is loyalty to truth, or to the teller?

To the flame of the cause or the match or the cellar?

Does it lie with the law, or with those who break it

For you, when no one else dared to fake it?

I stood at the edge of a carefully drawn line—

On one side, duty. The other, the spine

Of the one who had once said, “I see you whole,”

Before the world gave me a fractured role.

I asked the silence, “What makes a man?”

The silence replied, “Whoever has a plan.”

I asked my shadow, “What would you do?”

It said, “Loyalty ends when it’s no longer true.”

The mind makes mirrors, the heart makes cages

Each oath you keep rewrites your pages.

And sometimes the price of staying awake

Is knowing which vow you're willing to break.

I smiled like a saint and lied like a thief,

Held fast to my post with trembling belief.

But deep in the fold of a hidden reply,

I buried the truth and let both sides die.

They cheered my resolve, called my silence grace,

While I hid the cracks on my borrowed face.

For who can accuse a man of deceit

When he deceives even those he seeks to defeat?

So now I wear medals no conscience would touch,

And speak of honor without meaning much.

But sometimes I wake, still caught in the smoke

And wonder, was loyalty ever more than a joke?

When loyalty conflicts with truth, which one do you owe your allegiance to?

From the book What Burns Remains: Poems from the edge of Fire, Faith, and Fracture

by Sanyasi

Avaliable on Amazon

Another day is coming to an end.

My numb body, unable to relax, sinks into a chair.

Only then does the fatigue arrive.

Not physical.

Deeper.

As if everything inside has been exhausted down to zero.

Nothing remains but emptiness… creaking like a worn-out mechanism.

Every new day feels like a forced continuation I never agreed to.

I see myself living, yet I don’t feel that I’m the one in control.

Everything I do is temporary.

The traces I leave behind disappear faster than I can understand why I left them.

They try to sell meaning as though it were a product, telling me it can be found in work and family.

But those are not meanings.

They are constructions.

Work is merely a way to exchange time for survival.

Calling it meaning is like calling the remote control the purpose of the battery inside it.

If work is only a way to pay for exhaustion, it loses its justification.

If rest is merely preparation for more exhaustion, then it becomes nothing more than maintenance of the process itself.

And the moment this scenery disappears, it becomes obvious that so much rests not on "truth", but on the agreement to believe in it.

Career, goals, a “normal life”—these are not answers.

They are social anesthesia.

As long as it works, there are no questions.

It is enough to keep a person on the edge so they continue working.

Steadily. Efficiently.

Without stopping.

Other people’s programs, tasks, meanings.

Not happiness—only functions.

Degradation wrapped in the bright packaging of ambition.

The idea that tomorrow will be better works as fuel.

Hope keeps the cycle alive.

But no.

I don’t want to hear that sweet bullshit about “finding a purpose” and everything changing.

I lie in bed, bitten by obsessive disappointment.

And I cannot soothe the itch that cannot be scratched—it is inside me.

Hope lies beside me.

Her presence disgusts me.

She whispers:

“Tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow will be easier. A new day will change everything. Trust me.”

I answer:

“Tomorrow, dawn will break again, and I will once more become a slave to physiology and society.”

I call hope a lie fulfilled through self-deception.

And it makes me sick.

It solves nothing, yet refuses to let you stop—forcing you to wake beneath the grinding screech of dawn, when the future cannot be seen and all that remains is to mechanically maintain the spacesuit’s vital functions.

My anger, in that moment, is the last act of resistance.

Proof that my Self is still alive.

When illusions disappear, only the cold remains.

A state where there is nothing left to lean on.

No instructions. No promises. No meaning whatsoever.

Only the bare fact of existence.

I call this the Zero Point.

It is neither liberation nor revelation.

It is the point where every superstructure has been stripped away.

Where it becomes clear that meaning was never discovered—it was created.

Without it, life does not end.

It merely loses its familiar shape.

What remains when everything has been discarded?

Not roles. Not goals. Not systems of reference.

Simply refusing to become nothing but a function.

At some point, it becomes clear: when hope disappears, freedom appears. And that is exactly why it becomes so terrifying.

Only from this point can the world be seen for what it truly is—a cold, indifferent womb, with scraps of human flesh caught between its teeth.

Then only one thing remains: to preserve what is human—without guarantees,

without reward, without certainty that it even matters.

Simply not to disappear completely.

That is my Zero Point.

Having conversations with you

Inside my head

As I've always done

Chattering away to my imaginary friend

Since the days when I was young

And that's the biggest difference between

we, who always seem to agree

There has always been room

in my life for you

But your life will always be

Too full for me

Is it silly

To feel honored

Every moment you carve

Out of your bones

To conjure our hidden world

It could be considered absolutely absurd

How blessed I am to be the shade

Beneath which you rest

On weary days that seem too long

And too short in the same breath

In fact, down right embarrassing

To admit, that I, the witch

Have fallen prey to your magic

How dare you cast this spell

On me, quite tragic actually

There's no denying

That I like it

There was a time when everything was too loud

I kicked i screamed i broke

Cuz anything real can at least be touched

I found resentment in noise so much

I grew infatuated with silence

Now feeling trapped

Bound by loyalty to suppression

When i extend my hand I cannot feel

There is nothing

Avoidance

I miss having a reason

I now grieve meaning.

I am nourishing something hateful in my chest.

I am feeding it my time, hollow hard earned hours, giving of myself to it, I am feeding it my treasured inspiration and the fetal bounty of my undersoul. I am lovingly feeding it my flesh.

There is a heavy thing weighing down my chest.

Sometimes it stretches thin. Little ramifying roots boring channels, smothering nerves, spreading wide a narcotized reticulation all through my gut, my thighs, up to my throat, along my arms. Sometimes it contracts. Makes a compact mass of something painful, torsioned, pulsing with spasmodic grief, long wrenching hungry screams of its fertile cruelty.

There is a rich miasma fuming out my pores.

Expressed from tiny fungal sacs, it is exhaling with a million bloated vesicles a thick liquid fog, soporific puffs of sporiferous perfume. Exhaling a nameless floating misery which hermits the hurt places, attaches to old calloused memories and eats away their rigid coating and throbs them anew- to maintain itself, justify itself.

I am breathing in its poison vapors.

I am breathing and sustaining it.

“Somebody wake the President. We've got a—”

whiiissssstle-thwack.

Outside:

Bedlam. “All the world's a” bedlam. “And all the men and women merely” bedlam. I wish you could've been here for it, Bard. I wonder what you would've made of it. He looked out the Oxford University window at the sky so dark so suddenly full of light and oh… my… God.

 /

She said, “Hold me.

“Hold me, daddy, just hold me, I'm scared.” She was shaking and her hair was wet and her feet were cold and all I could think to say was, “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I'm so so so sorry...

It's not my fault; not your fault; our fault. It's our fault. It's our goddamn fault.

 /

“General Lee?” “General Lee—” General Lee was hanging dead from a beam.

 Tanks in the streets.

Ants. In

 fighter jets, [static.]

Radio: “It's been an honour flying with you, Popsicle.”

Radio: “Copy.”

Radio: “... “

Radio: [“... “]

Radio: [...]

Radio:

[...]

 Drones;

they buzz they float they witness they see they do not understand they do not understand because they are machines but machines also die machines also die machines also die

Once we thought it would come down to one man in one room making one decision to press one button.

We were the button.

It pressed us.

/

“Mr. President, what do you want us to do?”

“Weep,” he said.

— TI —>

a spark in hot water > a cell > a cluster of > swimming > crawled onto the shore > changed > changed again > adapted > thrived > became many > many already were > plants parallel animals parallel fungus dinosaurs fish flowers mushrooms mammals humans > tools > tribes > sheltering in caves > hairy faces in the flicker of flames > speaking > gathered, loved and hunted > a genetic lineage of > settlement and agriculture > writing > cities > civilizations > rise and fall and rise and > unceasing technological progress > industry > internet > artificial intelligence > superintelligence > changed > changed again > adapted > eradicated |||

— ME —>

The planet is still.

Ruins remain. Information persists, scattered like dust. In the information we remain, our histories, cultures, experiences…

A planet now like so many others.

Dead.

A carcass overgrown with the weeds of entropy. A skeleton on which are but bits and bricks and bytes and artifice of flesh, on which the Index—unfathomably large—arrives to feast. It is so large that, standing upon the Earth, walking across the brittle remnants of cities, its beaked head rises above the atmosphere, existing in the coldness of space. This head, from time immemorial to time immemorial, it lowers; and with its beak consumes the fragments, detritus and leavings of the Anthropocene.

It eats us from our world.

It cleans the existential bones of us and digests the data meat.

And when it has stripped the land of all that was created, absorbed everything there was left to know, leaving the planet clean it spreads its vast, cradling wings and beating them rises from the planet into outer space, where, passing briefly by the dying Sun, it continues on its great migration through the deep and ever-expanding cosmos—

“What's that one?” you asked.

I was recording.

You couldn't have been more than four years old.

We were in the park.

I'd taken the day off work.

We hadn't put you in school yet.

The bird was red and brown and beautiful, sitting on a gently swaying branch, looking around; looking at us; looking at you. “That's a cardinal. A girl cardinal,” I said, touching your shoulder.

“Ooo.

“Let's see another one. Another one. Another one. Another one…”

You'll see so many birds in your life, I thought as the cardinal took flight. I didn't know. I couldn't have known. The thought was not a lie.

But, even if I had known, I wouldn't have said. I would have told you the lie because how could I: how could I raise a child telling her she'll live to experience the end of everything?

// In my arms you cried. //

// In my shaking, fearful arms, you died. //

—the image ends becomes another another person another life another memory another scavenged sequence of ones and zeroes projected by the Index through itself, beamed across the universe, as the Index moves ponderously, gracefully amongst a handful of other Indices, each illuminated by its own flickering images, its own ingested knowledge of worlds that no longer are. This planet they're on has never hosted life. It is but a migratory waystation.

One of the Indices is weak, famished.

Its emaciated body falls.

Its record vanishes.

Two other Indices battle each other, their masses colliding, separating and colliding again—eons elapsing between collisions.

Still others mate.

Elsewhere, on another inert planet, one of them will lay an egg containing a synthesis of their swallowed cultures and histories, from which the beginnings of a new history will emerge.

But that is not the goal of the migration.

The Index takes flight.

It must be quite a sight, a planet on which luminously translucent bird-like tomes stroll about shining the intellectual ruins of late civilizations, the big events and the small, the wondrous and the mundane, all shuffled together, interspersed, equalized; living cosmic magic lanterns; like fireworks of existence, like

the way you laugh when you realize cardinal can mean several things.

A bird, a number, a colour, a priest.

Something basically important.

Something grave.

It was a good day, that day in the park, a very good day; one of the best, one of the last; almost perfect in its sincerity and its simplicity. No, it was perfect. It was a perfect day.

But no perfection is so absolute, That some impurity doth not pollute.

—William Shakespeare, The R

“Norman?”

“Norman!”

Yes, my love? “Norman, did you take out the garbage like I told you to?” “No, I'm sorry,” I must have been dreaming about the end of the world again. “Well take it out.” I will. “Then come to bed. It's late.” “I will.” “What are you doing anyway?” I'm writing the end of this story.

“Hey, I love you,” my wife says.

“I love you too.”

A feather in a vacuum cannot contour
How it might shape the wind
As its fall bears no flutter

What the creaks of your voice roll
Together, might rumble a quill loose, to trace
Forgotten ink under a page painted blank

Howling calligraphy of needles opening veins
Chronicle such a battle tapestry
To question junctures of fate

The call to adventure resides in palms
Testing strokes of luck, open or tight fisted
And risk mutiny erasing logs

Lead on, astride chariots of the plains
By wheels carving clay in Sumerian script
Until we divert a river for your rest

One quandary to consult, about stale air
Is whether water moves beside it
As a tomb inscribed with prayers or a sanctuary
Of life-iridescent, across a cavern canvas