Listen.
Stop not listening.

I’ve been tapped.
Sap bleeds.
It stings where sweetness lives.

Give me your ears.
I’ll torch ‘em to caramel.
I don’t need your lips,
your yowls, your static.
But taste.

Just ******* syrup.

Your screech gnaws
at the stem of my melody.

Eat the fruit.
Chew the pit.

the mirror reveals
an uncomfortable truth:
my biggest villain

I did not fear death, not really—
but I feared the garden that never withers,
the bloom that outlives its meaning,
the stem that will not bow no matter how long the wind begs.

Somewhere in me, a root forgot how to decay.
The belladonna opened her mouth and never closed it again.
No bees. No dusk. No soft, collapsing fruit.
Only the poisoned blossom holding its pose like a dancer who cannot hear the ending note.

The others fell—
petals sighing into soil,
leaves tucking themselves into brown envelopes of forgetting—
but I stayed,
a stalk trembling with nothing left to say,
no more sun to drink, no shade to crave,
just this:
this unbearable continuity.

I fear not the grave, but the droughtless field.
I fear not rot, but the failure of rot.
The stillness where decomposition was meant to sing,
but the air refused its sacred burden.

The seeds inside me are not brave enough to die.
They turn in their shells endlessly,
gnawing against germination,
spinning their green myths in a loop too tight for history.

What if I never fall?
What if the wind skips me,
and I remain the lone yew unbent by any season?
No frost for my veins to crack beneath,
no harvest moon to call me done.

The ivy is patient,
but even ivy wants a stone to sleep on.
I have no such gift.
Only this always.
Only this flowering that won't collapse.
Only this sun that never has the grace to leave.

I beg the ground to remember me.
To take me the way it takes everything good.
But the dirt,
the sacred dirt,
passes over me like a skipped psalm,
and the roots around me forget how to die in my presence.

So I bloom,
again,
again,
again—
each time less real, less warm, more artifact than flower.
A specimen in an eternal spring.
A prayer with no god left to wither for.

And the belladonna does not blink.
And the petals refuse their final gesture.
And I remain—
not immortal,
but uninvited to the end.

Why do you sing, O century silhouette,
when the throat has been whittled down to wire?
The man Vitruvian keens into the looking glass
and finds only the nihilist’s flesh,
stripped of longitude, soaked in the salt of manufactured weeping.

I was given ten fingers and no directions.
I was spun against the glass until the blood spelled "almost."
I wore the seasons like iron masks,
kissed the ledger, devoured the compass,
named myself after bridges that always collapsed mid-chant.

Every morning the architects unhook their jaws,
feed me dreams pressed into coins.
Eat, they whisper.
Eat until your hunger obeys its perimeter.

The chalice of fog tilts. I drink.
The wires behind my teeth sing hymns of acceptable dislocation.
I chart my own disappearance across the graph paper of strangers’ hands.
I balance. I fracture. I smile politely into the incision.

The man Vitruvian does not move.
He is stitched to the skin of the air,
pinned like a moth caught between radii.
I am the moth.
I am the pin.
I am the scream that barters itself for scaffolding.

Why does the shadow mimic me with better posture?
Why do my own elbows bloom into foreign cities?
I touch my reflection and peel back latitude like old paint.

Inside the mirror: a harvest of bruised alphabets,
a clock vomiting its own minutes,
a body with all the wrong apostrophes carved into its chest.

I was not built for this recursion.
I was built for something that forgot how to pronounce me.

The man Vitruvian counts his ribs backward.
I copy him, unspooling bone by bone,
trading every instinct for a better angle of collapse.

Drink, they say again.
Sip from the river where your face is a stranger.
Measure your wrists against the urns of approval.

I keened once, I remember.
I split the ledger with my teeth.
I wore the square like a skin, until the skin began to hum static.
I forgot my own weight. I forgot my own axis.

The chalice tips again.
The fog is heavier this time.
The century silhouette dances crooked on my chest, laughing.

Somewhere, a circle collapses into dust,
and nobody mourns except the moths,
and the man Vitruvian, laughing,
wets his throat with the ashes of symmetry.

It's funny how
It's easier to open my skin
Then to open my mouth
And ask for help