They said,  
“time heals everything.”  
But I bled out in the waiting.

So I opened the promise like a body—  
scalpel truth,  
steady hands,  
no anesthesia.

What I found inside was worse  
than emptiness.  
It was intention.  
A fabrication shaped like comfort,  
wrapped in silence  
so we’d never call it cruelty.

This lie was passed down—  
ritualistic,  
well-meaning,  
loaded with poison  
sweet enough to swallow.

I kept it in my chest for years.  
Let it nest between lungs  
as if belief was supposed to bruise.

Now I extract it  
line by trembling line.

Even hope can rot  
if left unsaid too long.

Forgotten in this echo-tight scream,  
where the air won’t carry sound  
and even grief arrives delayed.  
I tried to write my way out of it—  
but the ink dried mid-thought,  
froze inside the pen  
before it could name the wound.

My voice fossilized in the marrow  
of some unspoken ache.  
Not buried—  
just shelved in a room  
no one visits anymore.

You call it stillness.  
I call it sediment.

I trace old outlines  
like memory’s archaeologist—  
dusting off fragments  
that never fit  
but refuse to leave.

Each word weighs more than it used to.  
Each silence—  
louder than breath.

My head ticks and tocks  
like a grandfather clock  
with a grieving jaw.  
Hours droop.  
Time slouches inward,  
skipping stones across memory  
I swore I’d drowned.

There’s no forward in this place—  
just loops pulled taut  
and calendars  
that flinch when I turn the page.

I stopped marking days  
when they stopped holding shape.  
Now time arrives  
already exhausted.

It used to race.  
Now it recoils  
each time I try  
to move on.

Another day—  
heads down, no one meets my gaze.  
Fingertips glow blue from too-bright screens,  
thumbs moving faster than thought.

We’ve replaced eye contact  
with read receipts.  
Affection  
with filtered selfies  
and half-typed replies.

I haunt timelines  
that never notice.  
Scroll through memories  
we never made  
but somehow still miss.

Every ping  
feels like hope—  
every silence  
a knife with a quiet ringtone.

I try to speak,  
but my voice autocorrects  
to nothing.

We are present,  
but not here.  
Together,  
but only in algorithm.

And even then—  
you don’t see me.  
Just another  
digital ghost  
you once knew.

Everything’s swirling beneath  
the weight of borrowed names.  
I stumble through tides  
too high to outrun,  
but still try,  
until I’m seamlessly drowning  
in the undertow of selves  
I never asked to wear.

Thoughts burn out  
like half-smoked cigarettes—  
spent, bitter, and barely mine.

Is this lucid dreaming  
or suffocating memory?  
I can’t tell where I’ve already turned,  
only that I’m back  
in the fog again.  
Dazed.  
Unmoored.  
Wearing too many faces  
for any of them to feel like mine.

Shadows in my chest  
raw and unspoken,  
panic tracing circles  
through a throat too tight to scream.

Every mirror offers a different name.  
None of them mine.

I swap faces mid-sentence,  
rotate smiles like lock combinations—  
hoping one of them fits the door  
back to who I was.

Time stutters.  
My voice comes out  
wearing someone else’s rhythm.  
Even breath feels borrowed.

“Are you okay?” they ask.  
I nod in the language  
of collapse.

It’s not pretending.  
It’s preserving.  
It’s prayer.

This is my psalm—  
not sung,  
but screamed through cracked glass  
with every rotation  
of the mask.

the hands / the bonds / the pages—  
never mine  
but bound to me like scripture I forgot to believe in.  

the verse never repeats,  
but always paints  
in colors I don’t remember choosing.  

mirrors offer nothing but  
faces that echo mine  
without ever becoming me.  

torn into fugues / scattered into names—  
each one dragging me somewhere new,  
directionless,  
but always away  
from wherever I might be.

Silence wasn’t empty.  
It was alive.  
Thick with what no one could say,  
what I never dared to ask.

It filled the room  
like smoke after prayer,  
curling around my ribs  
until I forgot how to breathe without holding back.

I thought it was safety—  
this quiet.  
But it was a verdict  
disguised as peace.

And when I finally listened,  
I heard everything I tried to bury:  
the grief,  
the want,  
the name I refused to speak.

Silence didn’t spare me.  
It kept score.

Shadows rot beneath my ribs, panic waltzes razor-thin  
Voices in my head clash—battle cries where night begins  
Strangers drive my bones toward the edge I forgot  
Mirror swallows me whole—no rescue from glass  

Who am I? Splitting to survive  
One soul, fractures come alive  
Internal kingdoms burn while the pieces wage blood  
Heavy weights crush the beating flood  

Synapse cracked open, thunder in my veins  
Cycling through faces, chaos loves its chains  
Masks devour each other—nothing stops the spin  
Identity dislocated—where do I end or begin?  

Rage erupts—fists pound the void, chaotic stream  
Shell of a thought, stitched inside this dream  
A hundred voices rise, all tugging at the seam  
Freedom not freedom—it weeps in the scheme  

Who am I? Splitting to survive  
One soul, fractures come alive  
Internal kingdoms burn while the pieces wage blood  
Heavy weights crush the beating flood  

Truth bleeds out through prisms cracked and cruel  
Clock ticks backward—reality’s duel  
Mind’s a maze—no compass, no absolution  
Screams starve in silence—dose me with dissolution

They didn’t slam the door.  
They just stopped walking back through it.  
And somehow,  
that silence broke louder  
than any goodbye.

I still keep the light on—  
not because they’re coming back,  
but because some part of me  
believes in ghosts  
that look like second chances.

Sometimes I hear their voice  
in a room they never entered,  
feel my hands reach  
for a warmth that no longer answers.

I don’t forgive what they did.  
But I’ve forgiven the shadow  
that lingers on my porch  
like a memory too soft to bury.

I keep the light on.  
Even when it flickers.  
Even when I’m the only one  
who ever sees it.

Because somewhere in the dark  
is still a version of me  
that believes in return  
without expectation.

Head spinning—  
dazed in this stormcloud of confusion.  
It isn’t fog.  
It’s a maze made of color and collapse.

Every turn—  
a new place with no map,  
no anchor,  
just faces too blurred to remember,  
yet somehow still watching.

Voices press in,  
muffling thought.  
Every word I reach for  
chokes in the static.  
Reality fades—  
peeling off in shards.

All that’s left  
are shattered echoes,  
broken memories  
calling from somewhere  
I can’t return to.

Meaning sinks beneath the sorrow.  
Hollowed out.  
Spun dry.  
Still standing  
inside the labyrinth.

I didn’t write this for the healed.  
I wrote this for the haunted—  
for those who stare at ceiling cracks  
like they’re reading scripture  
from a collapsed cathedral.  

These pages aren’t a map to recovery.  
They’re the wreckage.  
The bloodstains.  
The echo where a name used to fit.

Each poem a pulse.  
Each line a fragment.  
Not a solution—  
but proof the soul still bleeds in shape.

So if you're holding this,  
you’re not alone in the ruin.  
Welcome.  
Take off your armor.  
We only write in exposed nerves here.

They only see the version  
that didn’t scream.  
The one who smiled  
because silence had sharper teeth.

Behind this grin:  
razorwire laughter,  
polished to deflect inquiry.  
A thousand masks  
stitched from survival.

I learned to dance  
in venom shoes—  
every step a negotiation  
with ghosts no one else sensed.

It’s not deception.  
It’s preservation.  
A camouflage of grace  
in a world that punishes visible pain.

But under this costume,  
the truth foams at the seams.  
Grief behind gloss.  
Fury in a silk-lined sigh.

This is the masquerade  
you demanded I wear.  
But I warn you—  
the fabric’s unraveling.

And when it falls,  
don’t flinch at the fangs.  
They were always there.  
You just didn’t want to look.

Why do I even bother anymore.  
This ache’s been hiding beneath sweet veneers,  
a bitterness that won’t dissolve.  
It clings—  
festering near the heart,  
sinking into my veins  
like it belongs there.

Thoughts spiral,  
spliced with voices  
that tangle and echo until  
I can’t feel the edges of what’s real.  
I linger too long in fractured reflections,  
where clarity used to live.

The air’s thick—  
it steals my voice  
before I even speak.  
I’m fading from the foreground,  
becoming background noise  
in a world that doesn’t blink.

Everything stares back  
with blank expressions  
and unfamiliar eyes.

There isn’t one of me.  
There never was.

I am a constellation of echoes—  
names I wore out,  
faces I reshaped in panic,  
versions of self collapsed in each other’s arms.

Each fragment learned how to breathe  
before the rest could speak.  
Each survived  
the moment I didn’t.

We don’t always agree.  
But we carry the weight together.

Sometimes I wake in a different voice.  
Sometimes I forget which pain belongs to which part.  
But we are all mine,  
and none of us were chosen.

Don’t ask who I really am.  
That’s the wrong question.  
Ask:  
who held the memory  
when I couldn’t anymore?  
Who took the blow  
so one of me could stay soft?

We fracture to remain whole.  
We rebuild in ruin.  
This is not disorder.  
This is design.

The space between me and myself  
drifts—  
like a lucid dream  
leaking out the back of my skull.

I watch my thoughts  
float toward stars that don't remember  
where I end.  
Where I ever began.

I'm stretched across the cosmos,  
limbs limp in vacuum,  
the gravity of depression  
coiling tight around my ankles—  
its pull quiet,  
but absolute.

Reality thins  
like skin over old scars.  
My mind—a kaleidoscope of fractures.  
Each disorder twisting the glass,  
each diagnosis tinting the view  
until even my reflection feels pixelated.

This fog...  
it’s not metaphor.  
It’s a beast.  
Thick. Grey. Permanent.  
It wraps around my face  
until even breath  
becomes a rumor.

The lines blur.  
Days collapse.  
I forget the taste of clarity.  
Did I ever have a name?  
Did I ever live inside this body  
with certainty?

I am orbiting myself—  
too far to reach,  
too familiar to forget.

The silence in here  
has weight.  
It hums.  
It judges.  
It catalogs my fade  
in decibels too quiet for anyone else to hear.

Memories fade like echo trails—  
burnt-out signals  
from versions of me  
that never made it back home.

I keep screaming  
into the night of my own skull—  
but the signal never reaches Earth.  
No one hears.  
Not even me.

I am the void  
after the story ends.  
I am the silhouette  
of a soul that got left behind  
when the body forgot how to stay.

This isn’t a breakdown.  
This is drift.  
This is what happens  
when gravity gives up on you.

Title: Out of the Reliquary of Broken Self

I forgot the shape of my name  
but not the ache it left in my mouth.  

Memory fractured.  
Flight stitched from ash.  
Still, I flew.

"Hey doc, I came in feeling kind of strange..."

My thoughts skip  
like scratched discs—  
looping refrains  
I don’t remember writing.  
Someone moved the furniture  
inside my mind.

Eyes follow  
that aren’t there.  
Or are.  
They blink  
just after I do.

I’ve started measuring silence  
between footsteps  
I didn’t take.  
Mirrors hesitate now—  
they show me,  
but too slowly.  
Like they’re checking  
who I’ll be this time.

Every word I say  
feels recorded.  
Every truth I try to speak  
static-warped,  
time-delayed.

It’s not fear  
if it turns out real, right?

The walls are breathing  
or maybe I am.  
Hard to tell anymore.  
Even time flinches  
when I look at it wrong.

If this is normal,  
I need a new diagnosis.

Pulse frozen—  
iced veins mid-break,  
brain flooding with fragments  
of fractured light and wired noise.

Every color comes too loud.  
Every breath enters sharp-edged.  
The sky is too close.  
The floor doesn’t hold.

I stagger through a maze  
built of memory and migraine—  
walls shift shape  
each time I blink.

I am too many signals,  
too little pattern.  
A scream poised  
inside a prism.

Please—  
just one thought  
that doesn’t bloom sideways.

Just one silence  
that doesn’t shimmer wrong.

Sweat stings my face—  
not from effort,  
but from holding it together  
too long.

Something’s gone quiet  
deep inside.  
Not peace.  
Just absence.

My heart feels hollowed  
by repetition.  
Even pain gets bored  
when it’s expected.

I’m suffocating  
under normalized collapse.  
Spacing out like it’s ritual.  
Fading  
like my body forgot how to stay loud.

Ran thinned.  
Worn through.  
Care spilled out  
and didn’t come back.

There’s no scream.  
Just dust in the throat.  
Just me,  
still here,  
watching the nothing pile up  
like it might mean something again.

My heart stopped beating, but am still breathing.
Drink in my hand , but it's not healing.
You tore it out, left me on empty.
Dead inside , but my lungs keep working.
Pour another shot just to feel alive.
Every night the silence keeps me locked in this ache.
Say it's over , but your name still on the screen.
Face on replay in my mind like a ***** routine.
Tired to smoke out the pain, tried to drown out your sound.
All these faces in the crowd, but it's you I still can't drown.
I'm still alive but you took the best of me.
Left my ribs wide open where my heart used to be.
Should I text , should I call ?
Hit delete, disappear.
But you're everywhere I look when the morning comes near.
You were my everything, now am losing my mind .
Can't run from you , can't leave you behind.
Look what you made me, now I can't feel.
My heart stopped beating, but am still breathing.
Drink in my hand , but it's not healing.
You tore it out, left me on empty.
Dead inside , but my lungs keep working.
I see myself from the outside.
Hands shaking, cold, staring down another glass (so cold).
Used to want tomorrow, now I barely want tonight.
Told myself I'd let you go, but I still can't ask. Why'd you break me like that?
My heart stopped beating, but am still breathing.
Drink in my hand , but it's not healing.
You tore it out, left me on empty.
Dead inside , but my lungs keep working.
Still here, still breathing.
But I don't feel a thing.

I don’t miss them.  
I miss the shape I became  
when they looked at me  
like I mattered.

I miss who I could almost be—  
before the weight of leaving  
taught my reflection to flinch.

Now,  
I carry echoes that don’t belong to me.  
Laughter I didn’t laugh.  
Affection that calcified  
somewhere between memory and myth.

I keep their names  
in the soft part of my mouth—  
not to speak,  
just to feel  
the wound hum back.

Loss isn’t always absence.  
Sometimes it’s residue.  
The kind that won’t wash out,  
even when the body tries to forget  
where it bled.

Disoriented beneath overstimulation.  
Voices hum like glass under pressure—  
etching through my thoughts.  
Sensations blur into splinters,  
emotion refracted,  
core unraveling.

Silence weighs fossil-deep,  
layered under memories  
that calcified too soon.  
Truth endures like a fracture—  
symbolic, visible,  
threaded seam by seam  
through the spine of me.

I catalogue collapse  
in mirror shards,  
each one echoing alone  
in the distance.

Minds hollowed with unspeakable voices lingering.
These words are intangible.
Twining and twisting before the ink leaves the pen.
Thoughts unimaginably twisted, dwelling deeply inside.
Suffocating under stationary pride.
Predatorial deceitful.
Swallow cheats beating empty.
What a cage these undeniable voices, snaring me in.
Clawing on my inside, lungs collapsing.
This pressure precedent.
Stuck within a vortex loop , endlessly spinning out of control.

They told me confusion was weakness.  
But I’ve made temples from tangled thoughts.  
Scriptures written in static.  
Faith practiced in contradiction.

My truth doesn’t wear straight lines.  
It spirals—  
curved like grief,  
crooked like survival.

Inside this head,  
reality is a negotiation.  
Each thought barters  
with the one before it—  
nothing certain,  
everything sacred.

I forget who I was yesterday,  
but I remember the sound  
of my own scream  
echoing through  
fractured time signatures.

It’s not madness.  
It’s devotion.  
To endure  
in chaos  
and still hum  
my own name.

So when I say I believe in nothing  
but motion,  
fracture,  
and delirium—

Understand:  
this is my doctrine.  
This is my rite.

Minds, hollowed—  
ghost-chambers echoing with voices that never meant to stay.  
They drag their claws along the skull  
just to prove they're real.  

These words don’t write.  
They convulse.  
They twist mid-thought,  
snapping like tendons in inkless pens.  

Thoughts bend—unnatural,  
like limbs forced backward in prayer.  
Each one a splinter lodged  
too deep to mourn properly.  

Pride calcifies—  
a stone swallowed out of habit,  
weighing down the throat  
until breath becomes performance.  

Deceit prowls the ribcage  
wearing kindness like a borrowed face.  
Swallow cheats  
beating empty—  
percussion without a pulse.

And still—  
the voices.  
Razor-rung, relentless.  
They gut the lungs from within,  
fill the chest with phantom limbs  
that clench when I try to rest.

This is precedent.  
This pressure.  
This loop wrapped in bonewire.  
Endless.  
Clocks without numbers,  
ticking inside the teeth.

Let’s walk the wreckage barefoot,  
through memories sharp as shattered psalms—  
each bone a prayer, each scar a chorus  
echoing grief in broken qualms.  

I’ve worn collapse like second skin,  
threaded my name through rusted seams,  
carried silence in the sockets  
where I once stored softer dreams.  

Damage done, repeated scripture,  
spoken in a stranger’s tongue.  
Every wound a familiar fixture—  
every verse I’ve bitten from.  

My reflection changes nightly,  
ghosted in the glass it leaves.  
Not a stranger—just unlikely,  
just a skin I’m forced to grieve.  

I’d sail myself to nowhere lands,  
trade these thoughts for phantom seas,  
but the tide still grips with bone-split hands  
and drags me back through memories.  

These edges—thick with visual lies,  
mirrors dressed in stolen light—  
carve new truths into my eyes  
and steal the name I’d try to write.  

So don’t mistake my silence  
for surrender or for sleep—  
I’m the hymn beneath the violence,  
I’m the secret shadows keep.  

Directionless but moving still,  
with every fracture in my spine,  
toward some echo none can fill,  
toward a self that once was mine.

I keep floating  
in the aftermath of what I never said.  
Words left sealed inside  
tight as a vacuum-packed wound.

I orbit old versions of myself—  
each more silent than the last.  
None of them landed  
where the heart was supposed to beat.

Nothing holds me down here.  
Not guilt.  
Not grace.  
Just this feeling  
of breath stretched too thin  
across memory.

My pulse drifts  
in low tide,  
no gravity to pull it home.

Even love feels hypothetical—  
a theory abandoned by every scientist  
who tried to measure my pain.

So I write  
just to hear an echo.  
Just to remind myself  
that silence isn’t the only thing  
still alive in me.