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They said ink was forever, but no one told me how it would feel to wear history under your skin, how it brands you not as a person, but as a relic. I want it out. Carve it from me, slice the memory from flesh, gouge each symbol until there is nothing left but blood and the sound of breathing through gritted teeth. Translate every line, every curve and cruel little mark, into agony, a night of reckoning beneath a sky that doesn’t look away.
Melt the gold. Let it burn. Pour it over my spine until it finds the fault lines in me, seeps into the fractures and remakes me. Not soft. Not forgivable. A statue, maybe. Something radiant and cruel, something you look at and flinch from because it gleams too brightly to be alive. I would rather be beautiful in my ruin than pitied in my suffering.
And still, beneath the gold, the river runs. The Styx coils in my veins, ancient and slow, and where it touches my soul, the skin splits open. He asks for penance. I have none. I have only these hands, these scars, this rage.
So I march with the rest of them. The dead who were never buried properly, the mourned and unmourned alike. We rot together in the open air, no prayers, no justice. Only the endless shuffling forward, bone against bone, ghost against ghost, hoping that pain might, someday, become something more than just pain.
Melt the gold. Let it burn. Pour it over my spine until it finds the fault lines in me, seeps into the fractures and remakes me. Not soft. Not forgivable. A statue, maybe. Something radiant and cruel, something you look at and flinch from because it gleams too brightly to be alive. I would rather be beautiful in my ruin than pitied in my suffering.
And still, beneath the gold, the river runs. The Styx coils in my veins, ancient and slow, and where it touches my soul, the skin splits open. He asks for penance. I have none. I have only these hands, these scars, this rage.
So I march with the rest of them. The dead who were never buried properly, the mourned and unmourned alike. We rot together in the open air, no prayers, no justice. Only the endless shuffling forward, bone against bone, ghost against ghost, hoping that pain might, someday, become something more than just pain.
Jul 3, 2025
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I don’t know how to be impressive. Not really. I flail in the presence of people who matter, who know they matter. My words stumble over themselves, disfigured by desperation. I shrink. Collapse in on myself. Press my body into the ground like penance, licking at the boots of whatever authority has been installed that day, professor, prefect, commander, man. I freeze, hollowed out by something obscene. Fascination, maybe. Or the kind of awe that borders on revulsion.
Who is he? What did he have to sacrifice to become that way? What dogma does he worship? And is it true, what they say? That the world is peeling open at the seams, rotting quietly beneath our feet, spiraling toward something so black and unknowable we dare not name it?
It burns. Deep. Right where marrow meets soul. Gaia is waking. She’s not benevolent. She doesn’t cradle; she devours. She claws her way up from the planet’s molten gut, a mother scorned and rabid with grief, carving new canyons into the crust with the rage of a thousand millennia. The ones we see now, the Grand, the majestic, the sacred, will look like cradle cracks by comparison.
Who is he? What did he have to sacrifice to become that way? What dogma does he worship? And is it true, what they say? That the world is peeling open at the seams, rotting quietly beneath our feet, spiraling toward something so black and unknowable we dare not name it?
It burns. Deep. Right where marrow meets soul. Gaia is waking. She’s not benevolent. She doesn’t cradle; she devours. She claws her way up from the planet’s molten gut, a mother scorned and rabid with grief, carving new canyons into the crust with the rage of a thousand millennia. The ones we see now, the Grand, the majestic, the sacred, will look like cradle cracks by comparison.
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🌳I am rotting.
I am haunted by an echoing pulse of once verdant requiems,
morbidly veiling my vision with whispering fungal blooms.
They chatter and chit,
until withering into skeletal thorns that sink beneath my skin and burrow into my cadaverous tissue.
I am overgrown with lingering epitaphs,
as if they were carved into me,
the memory of those I loved secluded in my vessel of a body,
nestled between my tendons and sinew,
Nervebound.
There is a rift between the seraphic nature of the dead and beloved,
and the morbid and discordant kiss of death that blesses me even in life.
Though I yearn in my anguished turmoil to either blossom or wilt for a final time,
the will for my fractured heart to return it's abyssal pieces from the void
is a pointless, forsaken task.
For all my decomposing pieces have been exiled into the earth,
distant and estranged from the Sun.
I will soon be bound by roots,
and I only hope my sap will be bountiful.
A solitary tree, hollowed by silence and a chambered wildfire.
My bark shall ossify into marrow and cartilage,
and a volatile mix of dendral viscera,
wood and resin and pine.
I am fated to decay,
until I embrace the sky,
resurging into a cathartic rebirth.
My crimson liquor within my veins will become liquid amber,
feeding you with sweetness and the phantom flavor of my flesh.
Jun 28, 2025
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🕳once I dreampt I fell in the crack of two pavement slabs. The fall was weak and subtle, but long and extensive. I could only reach the bottom once I braced myself, and I touched ground with my toes. Followed by heels. And I felt no pressure on my knees. But when I looked around it was so expansively dark, so clean and gradual. The floor looked like a gradient of baby blue to deep black in shadow. And the floor had such soft texture, trillions of tiny grooves and crevices to dozens of small gapes and caverns. Feeling it i felt like I was shaking a hand. And the blood of the opposing secreted out of it and into me, to warm me, to extend me. And after putting my palm against its, I felt my souls seep lower to feel it too. I had no shoes, no protection, I was naked. Exposed. But it felt so right when I lay on my back, my arms unparalleled. I felt euphoria like the calmest of deaths. And I lay still until I noticed the shift, I was on my feet again, my back on the wall now. And emerging from the limitless black I saw a glow of orange. Or pink. Or peach. A phosphorescent button held up by two eyes. And then a face. The structure was blue as the palm of my stability, and smooth as the wall behind. It points its fingers above us, and then to me. Where its omnipotent cornia traveled down its jugular to the four tips at my forehead. It left a sclera in its loss. And when it got that close, it burned me, it burned my soul, and it boiled my chemistry. And it pierced my forehead until I was blind. A blindness filled with color, and pattern. A blindness with utter understanding. I knew it all now, that this is my conscience. That this is experience, that this is existence. And I knew every word across each apparition of each tongue. This feeling dichotomizes my previous rest, and my future rest, but paralleled and copied our eternal form and sight. But when I grasped it all, I was lifted back above my concrete, my vision restored. My memory exhaust. In my knees. I see my door before its invert. With my hand still shaking its hand. And I look down to my feet, my toes warm, and the crack on my porch looking so familiar. So welcoming. Like the arms of my favor.
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I knew this love of mine was tired. Not the kind of tired that sleeps, but the kind that floats, listless and unmoored, like a feather dislodged in a storm. It drifted upward, aimless, circling, caught in the breath of things that once felt steady: laughter, warmth, the scent of jasmine from my grandmother’s porch before the war of illness took her away. Joyful people are rarely light. The ones who care the most often carry the heaviest sorrow, but they smile, because someone has to.
I understood this, too late, maybe, as the weight settled on my back like wet wool. I stood by the grave, the earth soft beneath me, and felt my heels sink into the mud. Ruined, cheap patent leather borrowed from my mother, now darkened with soil. She should have been angry. On any other day, she might have been. But not this time.
There was no room for anger. Only silence, shared between women who have known the quiet violence of duty.
I understood this, too late, maybe, as the weight settled on my back like wet wool. I stood by the grave, the earth soft beneath me, and felt my heels sink into the mud. Ruined, cheap patent leather borrowed from my mother, now darkened with soil. She should have been angry. On any other day, she might have been. But not this time.
There was no room for anger. Only silence, shared between women who have known the quiet violence of duty.
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For a man who follows his heart can never be weak. That’s what I used to believe, once, before the bodies piled up like autumn leaves, and belief curdled into something thinner than blood.
I caught the whistle player once, a man stitched together by calluses and riddles. His tune wasn’t music; it was a wound dressed in melody. It scraped something raw inside me. A song of mystery, yes, but also of cruelty, a tune without mercy. When I asked him how he knew such things, he only laughed. Said the desert had taught him.
Said that Mother Gaia, if she ever existed, didn’t whisper. She screamed. Through the grains of sand, she dragged him down, ankle-first, bone-deep, until he touched her molten heart. Said he came back remade, not better, just aware.
"Men," he spat, as if the word itself offended him, "have always been the destroyers."
Not gods. Not fate. Not even history. Men.
And I realized then: this isn't about nations or borders or wars. It’s about the individual. The one who chooses to light the match. The one who watches the blaze.
It is the gender.
It is the myth we wrote in our own image, thinking ourselves gods, when all we ever were, are, was ruin.
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There’s no one in the streets. No sun. Just air that tastes like glass, clear but not clean, and buildings that loom without casting shadows. Everything feels like it’s been stripped of texture. Like I could reach out and touch the world, and my hand would just go through it. No resistance. No weight.
Sex happens like clockwork. Mechanical. A function of survival, maybe. Like brushing teeth. I push it down every time, bury it under work, under errands, under excuses. I used to feel something, I think. A long time ago. Now it’s just static. Daily static. I don’t know if I’m asexual or just broken in some mundane, irreversible way. It speaks for itself, the silence of it. And that silence is loud.
It gets tiring, pretending that the distance is choice and not corrosion. That I’m not constantly eroding into something less than what I was. That I’m not grieving someone who’s still here.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m smarter than everyone else. Not in the way of grades or degrees, but in the way of rot, like I’ve stared too long into the abyss and memorized its language. Nihilism like a second skin. Maybe I make people feel stupid, or maybe they are. I don’t know. I just know I’ve learned how to weaponize detachment. How to turn thinking too much into a shield.
But there’s no comfort in being clever when everything feels invisible.
Sex happens like clockwork. Mechanical. A function of survival, maybe. Like brushing teeth. I push it down every time, bury it under work, under errands, under excuses. I used to feel something, I think. A long time ago. Now it’s just static. Daily static. I don’t know if I’m asexual or just broken in some mundane, irreversible way. It speaks for itself, the silence of it. And that silence is loud.
It gets tiring, pretending that the distance is choice and not corrosion. That I’m not constantly eroding into something less than what I was. That I’m not grieving someone who’s still here.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m smarter than everyone else. Not in the way of grades or degrees, but in the way of rot, like I’ve stared too long into the abyss and memorized its language. Nihilism like a second skin. Maybe I make people feel stupid, or maybe they are. I don’t know. I just know I’ve learned how to weaponize detachment. How to turn thinking too much into a shield.
But there’s no comfort in being clever when everything feels invisible.