Bonehouse

The house crawls on his back.

Not timber, not brick;

veins, roots, nerves, a heart that refuses burial.

Its windows blink like dying eyes.

The doors shiver with accusation.

It whispers debts, failures, names he swore he'd forget.

It hums with hunger.

It remembers.

It mocks.

He bends beneath it.

Shoulders pressed into the spines of ghosts.

Every step cracks the earth.

Dust rises in clouds of memory,

smelling of ash, unpaid promises, yesterday’s lies.

Inside, rodents gnaw at corners of his mind,

filing away sweetness, chewing marrow into echoes.

The house pulses, alive, sentient, cruel.

It leans into him like lover, arbiter, executioner.

It laughs when he swears.

Behind him, figures drift, spectral, carrying fragments

chimneys, walls, doorframes, whispers of legacy.

Faces fade into ochre dust.

Bones etched with blueprints of invisible architects.

They march without pause,

march into dust, wind, monotony.

Time bends, stretches, collapses.

Roots bite ribs.

Roofs press into skulls.

The wind screams in languages of laws forgotten.

Sky and soil have abandoned mercy.

He collapses. Twice.

He swears. Walls answer in silence.

He screams. Smoke returns twisted, accusing, ashamed.

Every nail is a thorn.

Every beam, a rib broken.

Every floorboard, a spine snapped.

The house devours endurance, marrow, memory.

Inheritance is a parasite; he is its host.

We watch, comfortably distant,

folding the weight into paperwork,

stuffing it into polite words,

forgetting it is ours too.

He rises.

He walks.

The house pulses against his bones,

older than law, older than blood.

It reminds him of unspoken expectation,

debts unpaid by the living,

silences left by the dead.

It sneers when he stumbles.

The sky bleeds ochre.

Stars hang like dust trapped in webs of memory.

Roots writhe into horizons like serpents.

He does not sleep.

The house does not forgive.

Each day is carved on the spine of time.

Each breath weighs like eternity.

He is priest, penitent, exile.

The house is altar, tribunal, specter, and trickster,.

He rises again.

Though roots bite deeper,

though the roof presses harder.

He carries not home,

but sins, silences, unfinished business of generations.

The line behind him shuffles forward.

Some stumble. Some vanish. Some rise again, bent but unbroken.

Fragments of houses that remember cling to shoulders, bones, marrow.

And still he walks.

And still the house pulses.

Alive, relentless, unforgiving.

One day, roots will claim him.

Beams will pierce flesh and sky alike.

Doors will snap shut on memory and marrow.

The house will move on

searching for the next bearer,

the next spine, the next flesh.

But not today.

Today he carries.

Today the house is flesh,

and flesh is debt.

Today the world watches,

and sees nothing.

He carries.

He carries.

He carries.

And the house laughs.

Etched In Blood, Carved In Stone

They say justice is blind.

But I have seen her.

Her eyes are wide open,

bloodshot, unblinking,

pupils cracked like burnt suns,

fixated not on truth,

but on coin and crown.

She is no saint of fairness,

no goddess of balance.

She is a charlatan in marble robes,

scales tilting toward whoever feeds her hungry appetites.

Oligarchs buy her silence.

Bureaucrats rent her gaze.

Faiths crown her corruption with worship.

Blindness cannot betray; only sight can.

It is not the dark that deceives,

but the eyes that watch and choose what to ignore.

We worshipped the lie that seeing meant fairness,

while her gaze, bought and rented, sold nations like cattle into chains.

She drinks from skulls cracked open with verdicts,

feeds on the marrow of the voiceless,

her banquet laid with broken oaths and

tongues torn from those who dared to speak.

Every gavel is a hammer on the anvil of her hunger,

every law a vein she drains dry,

until the people themselves are parchment;

their blood the ink of decrees

no one ever consented to sign.

And so we worship a hoax;

an idol carved in stone,

a promise etched into law,

an optical illusion painted as eternity.

We call her blindness a virtue

because the truth is unbearable:

Justice is an optical illusion,

a mirage painted on parchment,

a statue we convinced ourselves to be a god.

Her scales are rusted.

Her sword is dull.

Her vigilance eclipses statutes and skylines.

And when you plead for mercy,

it is not blindness you face, 

but convenience sharpened into indifference.

Justice is no natural force.

Justice is an apocalypse 

we fashioned, 

carved in stone, 

and

worshipped into being.

In Remembrance

I spend my days among the dead.

Stone tables for ceremonies,

steel knives for whispers.

Men, women, children,

split open like ripe pomegranates,

their flesh curling back in sheets,

ribs collapsing like scaffolds

from temples abandoned by gods who forgot their names.

Organs gleam like counterfeit treasures,

worthless coins for dead gods long forgotten,

blood clots into hieroglyphs across the floor,

each stain a language only silence reads,

each drip a punctuation mark

in a scripture no one will ever decipher.

The dead are merciful.

They do not scream when I unhouse their hearts,

do not recoil when I sever their secrets.

They offer endings in clean cuts,

like lips sewed shut,

like pages torn from a book the world will never read.

But home is not as kind.

There, my wife

once a woman, once a mirror to my marrow, 

moves like a vessel hollowed of spirit,

a ghost performing a life she no longer owns.

Her eyes are fogged lanterns,

flickering with storms no prophet dares name.

She calls me by strangers’ names,

by gods I do not recognize,

sometimes by no name at all,

and each syllable drives a wedge

deeper into the spine of our shared past.

Fifteen years of vows hang between us

like chains rusted onto bone,

like tombstones marking a grave

we have already begun digging ourselves.

Love is a relic buried under moss. 

To abandon her is treason;

to remain is to rot beside her.

I envy the cadavers.

At least they find closure.

They end.

I endure.

Each night, I walk the corridor of two abysses:

from morgue to home,

from corpses that lie still

to the one that still breathes.

I see her reflection in every shadow,

hear her whisper in every gust of air,

taste her absence in every meal.

The living, I have learned,

can haunt far more efficiently than the dead.

And every night, the truth pierces sharper,

carved deeper than any scalpel could reach.

Death is not the horror.

Decay is not the horror.

The horror is the corpse

that keeps breathing,

that remembers love as obligation,

that drags the living into graves

no stone, no prayer, no history can mark.

The world does not stop.

It does not pause for grief,

does not kneel at pain.

It watches, patient, indifferent,

while we stumble.

And I walk among it all;

the corpses, the living, the ruined, the hollow

and understand, at last,

some horrors never die.

They simply learn to breathe in a stranger manner every sunrise.

A Catacomb Country

They called it a nation,

but it was really a catacomb of matchsticks, 

a temple of embers,

millions of heads lacquered in red obedience,

lined shoulder to shoulder,

kneeling not in prayer,

but in expectation and anticipation of fire.

And when one flame burst at the edge,

it was not condemned.

No.

It was weaponized.

Suddenly it was not arson, 

it was destiny.

Not combustion, 

but covenant.

Not death, 

but deliverance.

Because once fire is labelled holy,

it no longer requires apology.

It only requires fuel.

The crowd bent forward as one,

every head tilted like pilgrims at an altar,

yearning to be consumed.

For in the Republic of Ashes,

citizenship is measured in dust,

and democracy means

all throats choke equally.

They sang in silence,

a choir of sulfur,

each head dreaming of its own immolation, 

for nothing unites like being burned the same way.

And so the Republic thrived,

not on justice,

not on freedom,

but on the promise

that every body would one day glow red,

before collapsing into grey.

Among them sat a boy,

a shadowchild of innocence,

smuggled past the border of belief.

In his hands

a paper dove,

creased wings folded from trembling hours,

a fragile scripture,

a forbidden gospel of truce.

The dove stirred,

as though memory itself longed for air,

but in this land, flight was treason.

Peace was banned literature.

Mercy was outlawed vocabulary.

And innocence was contraband,

smuggled only through children

who had not yet been taught to strike.

The matchsticks hissed at him:

“Peace is what we strike first.

Doves are for monuments,

and monuments are for ruins.

Keep your origami at the border, child;

here, we only deal in flame.”

The fire advanced,

chanting its eternal liturgy, 

“Unity.

Tradition.

Sacrifice.”

Holy words,

repeated so often they lost their weight,

and gained only smoke.

The boy listened,

and in their anthems he heard the truth:

that nations are kindling disguised as kingdoms,

that mobs are matches with voting rights,

that rulers sell fire as freedom,

and history is written

not in ink,

but in the memories of ash.

He clutched his dove tighter,

knowing it would never fly.

For in the Republic of Ashes,

birds are not set free.

They are clipped, folded,

and fed to the flames;

a ritual sacrifice to prove

that the fire still believes.

And the boy glimpsed, 

through smoke older than history itself, 

and it dawned at the dusk of his innocence

that this had always been the way of nations.

That every empire is a torch passed hand to hand,

until hands are gone.

That every anthem is smolder sung aloud.

That every monument is only stone,

waiting to be blackened by smoke.

The flame crept closer.

The matches leaned in, eager.

And the boy,

with his trembling paper dove,

realized the oldest prophecy of all:

That in the end,

every nation is a republic of ashes,

every people a parliament of fire,

every child a castaway of innocence

holding a bird

that no one ever lets fly.

Watching From The Hollows

There is no purpose.

Only borrowed lives.

Stolen ideas.

Debt-ridden breaths

we pretend are ours.

You think eighty years 

is a worthy lifetime?

It is but a flicker, at best.

A sneeze.

A pixel.

We crawl like insects

across dog years of amusement.

We breed.

We kill.

We hoard.

We claim dominion over worms.

Over birds.

Over civilizations.

All of it placed before us.

All of it pre-borrowed, pre-decided.

We grab it.

Name it.

Worship it.

Call it invention.

We are not creators.

We are inheritors.

Actors, 

reading lines

in a script

we cannot comprehend.

We are the dice

on someone’s cosmic chessboard.

Rolled.

Moved.

Sacrificed.

Never ours to command.

We stack meaning like blind architects.

Towers crumble mid-thought.

Religions.

Wars.

Love.

Fragile dreams.

All collapse.

And they, unseen,

drift beyond comprehension,

watching the cycle repeat

with patience older than stars.

Even the unknown suffers.

Even they drown in storms.

Burn in fires.

Glitch in their own matrix.

Chaos is impartial.

Entropy does not pause.

We die.

We fight.

We reproduce.

We suffer.

And somewhere, beyond vision,

a species

unknowable, untraceable

counts our misery like currency.

Observes the loops.

Places the next moves.

We mistake them as ours.

We are tiny, grotesque, screaming pixels.

Vomiting ourselves into eternity.

Nothing we call ours has ever been ours.

Everything we touch is rented.

Stolen.

Played.

Replayed.

And death 

is the pause 

we never get to play.

We are timelessly insignificant.

We are pointlessly alive.

And they,

lurking in the hollows,

prepare to roll the dice again.

Coins Of Blood

War is not a fresh idea.

It is older than the oldest fermentation

you’ve raised to your lips in the name of vintage whiskey.

It is as constant as physics claims energy to be, 

never ceasing, only shifting form.

War is older than the whole of humanity,

and yet every time it slithers back

we pretend it is the first,

because pro-bono empathy costs less

than sponsored violence,

and humans still need to prove

they are better than anything else that breathes.

But violence is the only thing truly democratic.

It does not distinguish

between mother, father, or child.

It arrives like a hungry tide,

sweeping entire families whole.

Bullets cannot tell the rich from the poor. 

Grenades do not ask for caste, creed or gender.

When death becomes religion, blood becomes worship,

and every breathing skin is lamb for the altar.

And if gods have taught us anything,

it is that they can never have enough.

What was once Auschwitz

became Syria,

became Afghanistan,

became Palestine.

What was once the ash of cities,

the rubble of villages,

the exile of countless souls,

has only changed names over time.

And still, the earth spins indifferently,

a billion lives circling the sun

as if corpses were not orbiting too.

War has become slogan and headline,

debate and performance,

and worst of all:

metaphor for the linguistic elites.

The hunter and the hunted

reduced to language,

because words are all the world ever spares,

while corpses pay debts in flesh.

The soil of old graves

is tilled to grow new ones.

Every silence between wars

is not peace,

only the inhale before

another detonation.

Even music learns this rhythm:

pause, then requiem.

We carve halos and horns

on whichever corpses suit the story,

but stone tablets crumble faster

than fresh gunpowder.

The air itself

negotiates the borders daily,

as easily as a finger through dust.

And when the coin is flipped,

both faces drip the same red.

Only the lettering changes.

And coins, after all,

were meant to be spent

until nothing remains

but their weight in bone.

The Roots Of Rot

We are a kind that worships cures.

Cures for hunger.

Cures for loneliness.

Cures for meaning.

As if plaster could fix the fracture of the world,

as if a smile could silence the bleeding sky.

We measure hope in prescriptions,

dose despair in milligrams,

and call it science

though it is nothing more than a prayer recited in laboratories

instead of temples.

We’ve always been obsessed with endings,

never origins.

Cures soothe the fever,

but never the infection.

They stitch bandages onto bullet holes,

call it peace.

They erect statues to bury history,

call it progress.

They post condolences on timelines,

call it empathy.

The cause is an old ghost,

a shadow we refuse to look at

because the cause is us.

Our hunger for invention that devours restraint.

Our greed carved into bone like inheritance.

Our habit of naming poisons as progress.

We are the infection we cannot disinfect,

the chaos too intimate to evade.

We romanticize cures,

write elegies for miracles,

sell salvation in plastic bottles,

and kneel before healers

as if they were new-age prophets.

But the body knows what the mind denies:

the cure is a camouflage,

a brief negotiation with inevitability.

Because the end was never meant to be postponed.

It was always meant to arrive.

And so we patch, we mend, we medicate,

while the root festers in silence.

Call it science, call it faith, call it denial, 

names are but syntaxes to distract from the actualities.

Cures treat the symptom.

The cause remains untouched.

The cause, unlike us

doesn’t just survive.

It waits.

It remembers.

It owns us.

In the end

we are but slaves to cures

so we don't have to admit

being the cancer of the causes.