Children Of Rust

They were born into corrugated sermons,

tin sheets preaching rust and voyeurism,

every ripple of metal a language’s imagination

in the art of peeling the world’s underwear.

Children apprenticed under rust,

learning anatomy through peepholes,

their curriculum a slit in the empire’s siding.

No chalk, no books,

just corrugated strands bleeding crimson fingerprints,

manuals of silhouette hips and hunger,

guides to a commerce older than memory.

Behind the curtain,

shadows stretched into currency.

Every gesture a fracture of measure,

every curve a traded shape.

Bodies became billboards,

billboards became vaults of shadow,

vaults, always exchanged,

a marketplace where innocence is rationed,

where curiosity runs in veins,

where desire is measured in whispers.

Children, scholars of slit-metal scripts,

read desire through rusted holes,

translating shadows into syllables of hunger.

But what they glimpsed

was not flesh, 

it was inheritance:

a world where longing is counted,

attention weighed,

and wonder carved into unbroken shards.

Rust peels, but nothing heals.

Tin remembers fingerprints,

children remember keyholes.

The walls remember too,

breathing, stretching, folding shadows into shapes

that shift and fracture with every glance,

that bend and fracture with every pause,

that fracture and fracture in endless echo.

When the wall finally collapses,

what spills through

is not light.

It is a cataract of silhouettes,

a flood of forms unspooling from the grammar of rust,

blinding the world with the darkness

it once taught them to read,

with the very darkness it once taught them to obey.

Children stand amid the debris,

eyes cupping shapes they cannot name,

hands tracing the remnants of a sky

that had been rationed, exchanged, repossessed.

And in that silence

the world realizes,

every slit, every shadow, every slit-metal fragment

was a blueprint of its own undoing,

every slit, every shadow, every fragment

was the world writing its own undoing.