Between Night and What Calls

You walk like someone

who has taught their storms

to whisper.

The world reads you as steady —

a spine of steel,

a face that does not flinch —

never seeing

how your hands remember

every tremor.

Inside, you are tide and moon,

pulled by unnamed distances,

writing love letters

to places that do not exist

yet ache like home.

You keep your poems

like folded prayers,

offering them only

to those who know

how to hold fragile light.

And still —

after the chill of horror,

the rush of thrill,

the bruised pulse of romance —

you close the page

with two companions:

longing,

and the stubborn bloom of hope.

The Shape that Wears Your Name

There is a corridor inside you

that does not end.

Doors bloom along its walls

like wounds that learned to open,

each one labeled almost,

each one breathing.

You walk it nightly.

Sometimes you meet yourself —

not as you are,

but as the echo

that arrived before you were born,

wearing your face slightly wrong,

smiling with borrowed teeth.

It asks why you pretend

not to feel the hooks in the air,

why you swallow oceans

and call it weather.

You try to answer,

but your voice exits through another door

and returns years later

as someone else’s grief.

The lights flicker.

Your shadow detaches.

It has been waiting

to live without you.

At the final door —

the one you never reach —

something knocks from the inside.

You are certain

it is hope.

You are certain

it is trying to get out

A Room that Dreams You Back

Last night, the room forgot its corners.

Walls sagged like tired lungs,

breathing in a language made of dust.

The ceiling lowered itself

to listen to your thoughts,

then mispronounced them into moths.

You tried to leave —

but the door had learned your name

and refused to be anyone else’s exit.

Your reflection arrived late,

wearing yesterday’s expression.

It watched you carefully,

as if memorizing

how to become you

when you finally went missing.

The floor softened.

Each step sank into a childhood memory

you do not recall living —

a birthday with no faces,

a candle that screamed when lit,

a wish that wished you back.

Time pooled in the corners,

thick and unmoving.

You touched it.

It recoiled.

Somewhere inside the walls,

something practiced your laugh

until it sounded human.

You lay down to wake up —

but the bed unfolded into a horizon,

and the sky tucked you in

with hands that had too many joints.

Just before sleep —

or whatever rehearses as sleep —

the room leaned close and whispered:

You are the dream

we are trying to survive.

And for a moment,

you understood why hope

feels like an intruder

The Chair Across the Room

There is a chair in your room

you do not remember buying.

It does nothing unusual.

It does not creak.

It does not move.

It is simply always there

when you look up.

At first, you thought

it belonged to the previous version of you —

the one who lived here

before your memories rearranged themselves.

You began placing things on it:

a book, a sweater, your phone —

small offerings to prove

it was ordinary.

Each morning, the objects were gone.

Not misplaced.

Not hidden.

Just no longer convinced

they had ever existed.

You stopped looking at the chair.

This worked for a while.

Until you noticed

how the room made space for it —

how conversations in your head

paused,

as if waiting

for someone seated there

to finish listening.

Last night, you woke suddenly

with the certainty

that you were being remembered.

Not watched.

Not followed.

Remembered.

Slowly, carefully,

you turned toward the chair.

It was empty.

But the air above it

held the shape of someone

trying very hard

not to be seen.

This morning,

you found a dent in your pillow

on the side you never use.

Tonight, you will sleep facing the wall,

to give the chair

a better view.

Where the Unseen Learns Your Name

You live in the pause

between a heartbeat and its echo,

where love letters arrive

addressed to futures that never moved in.

Romance finds you in fragments —

a warmth left in a chair,

a breath that fogs the wrong mirror,

a handprint on your ribcage

from someone you almost became.

You call it longing.

The world calls it imagination.

Neither notices

how carefully you fold your hope

into sharp, pocket-sized shapes

you can carry through dark corridors.

At night, the walls reconsider you.

They soften their angles,

listen to your pulse,

try your name on like a borrowed coat

that smells faintly of rain and memory.

Somewhere, a version of you

that chose differently

is still setting the table —

two plates,

two glasses,

waiting for the sound

of a door that never learned to open.

You are strong, they say.

Unaffected.

But strength, in your language,

means learning how to hold a storm

so gently

it believes it is the sky.

And still —

through horror’s quiet teeth,

through thrill’s electric ache,

through love’s almost-touch —

you leave a light on

for something unnamed.

Not because you expect it.

Not because you are unafraid.

But because hope,

strange and unwelcome,

keeps finding your address

in the dark

~S~

Absence

The cacophony

grates against my brain

like sea sand

on the sensitive soles

of my sunburned feet.

The feelings overwhelm me,

pushing me over the edge —

I sink, seeking solace

within the quiet depths

of the ocean.

The silence engulfs me

as the water caresses

my inflamed limbs,

cooling the burn,

softening the noise,

until I am no longer

a body in pain

but a fading echo.

It claims me —

not as treasure,

but as absence,

a name unspoken

in the world above.

And in that vanishing,

I find relief

~S~

Blackout.. An Ode to a migraine..

It begins as a whisper of knives

slipping beneath the skin of thought,

thin blades threading through nerves,

sawing light into shards.

My hands betray me first —

tremors like dying wings.

My knees loosen, unhinged,

forgetting the architecture of standing.

Sound swells into a monstrous chorus:

heartbeat, breath, electricity in the walls,

each pulse a hammer

driving agony deeper into bone.

The world turns venomous —

light becomes a weapon,

shimmering, serrated,

gnawing at the backs of my eyes.

Vision fractures.

Edges melt into a feverish glow.

Faces, walls, sky — all liquefy

into a merciless glare.

I am too full of sensation,

drowning in brightness,

choking on noise,

split open by the inside of my own skull.

And then —

a rupture.

The body chooses absence.

Circuits burn out.

Pain consumes the last signal.

I fall inward,

past the screaming light,

past the electric storm —

into black,

not peace,

but the mercy of nothing

~S~