I take a pill
that tastes like grace,
a tiny mercy just encased.
Another dose to calm the day,
and file tomorrow far, far away.
The market calls
it progress made –
a polished form of lemonade.
It sweetens cells with careful art
and charges up the aching heart.
We pay in time,
we pay in sleep;
the balance sheet is ours to keep.
The remedy arrives by mail –
a miracle with interest scale.
It treats the
world by smoothing pain,
and leaves the invoice in the vein.
I have loved you in pixels,
In the cathedral glow of screens,
Where devotion refreshes every second
And longing buffers endlessly.
Your face arrives compressed,
Your voice a small miracle of code.
Even desire must pass through servers
And be approved.
We leave our hearts on read.
We archive tenderness.
We type what we cannot say
And delete it
Like a sin forgiven too easily.
O modern love –
So public, so lonely –
We touch the world constantly
And rarely feel it touch back.
Horror ripens where consciousness leans into its own amplitude, where the inward gaze grows so lucid it begins to shimmer with excess. The mind, unable to contain its own horizon, performs a small, patient miracle: it secretes image after image, veils of terror lacquered into a kind of beauty, as though dread itself possessed a craftsman’s hand. Each vision settles, layer upon layer, until what first appeared as anguish gleams with a strange nacreous calm. One witnesses; the witnessing alters the witness. A quiet alchemy proceeds in the marrow, a quickening that feels like breath returning after a long descent.
There are landscapes for this – wide estuaries where the fog thinks, where light arrives late and lingers with a soft reluctance. A figure walks there, perhaps you, perhaps an echo that carries your name at a slant, and the ground receives each footstep with a softness that feels deliberate. The air tastes faintly metallic, a thought nearing articulation. Houses lean at improbable angles and persist with a stubborn grace, their beams holding a dream that has learned to stand. Windows glow without source. A door opens onto a corridor that extends inward, a geometry of recollection that draws the body forward with a mild, persuasive gravity.
Inside, the walls breathe. A slow oscillation passes through them, a pulse felt by the palm. Patterns bloom and withdraw, hieroglyphs that carry meaning in their recurrence. The gaze that meets the nape warms the skin, continuous, attentive. The sensation settles into companionship. Fear moves through the body as a clean current. The heart finds a quicker cadence; the lungs open and take in more air; the skin brightens, alert, articulate. Attention sharpens and gathers. Every edge grows precise. Every sound arrives with contour. The organism awakens to itself with a vigor that feels earned.
Figures appear, not quite human, not quite otherwise. Their faces carry expressions that move the muscles of recognition. They approach without footfall; the air closes around them and opens again. A hand – yours – reaches out and meets a surface that yields like water and retains its contour like stone. Contact translates into a pressure of thought. The body accepts the translation and amplifies it. Words slip and refashion themselves: terralume, mindtide, aurorosis. One says, involuntarily, je suis ailleurs, and the phrase returns as warmth that inhabits the chest, steady, companionable. A smile finds its way across the face, brief, surprised, almost conspiratorial.
Time loosens its knots. It unfurls, gathers, releases, a tide attentive to its own cadence. Moments overlap and lend one another a color. A childhood afternoon arrives within a future dusk; both take on a shared hue. You see yourself seeing, and the doubling carries a buoyancy that alters the weight of being. The body moves through this thickness of time with a light, practiced step. Fear circulates as energy, a bright current that sustains the stride, that keeps the senses open, that invites return.
The grotesque enters with a patience that suggests devotion. Structures of bone and machinery intertwine; their surfaces bear fine incisions, a script read by the hand. Conduits hum with a low current. The eye follows a curve, the hand traces a seam, and the seam answers with a faint warmth. Form gathers the senses and conducts them, a score that invites repetition. The body learns this score quickly. It leans in. It seeks the next passage, the next turn of the corridor, the next revelation of shape. The experience becomes a practice, a rehearsal of intensity carried out within a frame that holds.
I carry a private shard into this space: a room with a low ceiling, a calendar that held a single day as if it were a verdict, the sound of my own breath counting itself at three in the morning. The corridor receives these particulars and holds them. Their edges soften; their centers brighten. I walk, and the cadence steadies the pulse. The body discovers that it can host fear and feel a species of pleasure in the hosting, a warmth that spreads from sternum to throat, a brightness behind the eyes. The old ache finds a new posture.
A cooler voice passes through the scene, arranging without insistence. Horror here functions as a mode of cognition characterized by heightened perceptual density and a dilation of temporal intervals. The subject enters a bounded arena in which arousal rises and circulates without dispersal into action. Physiological activation – cardiac acceleration, respiratory expansion, cutaneous alertness – feeds attention and stabilizes it. The resulting state supports exploration: images are approached, handled, turned, and set in relation. The affect becomes legible through repetition. Pleasure adheres to the mastery of navigation, to the felt capacity to remain present while intensity increases.
Language plays at the edges, a sly artisan. Fear turns to fare and acquires a taste of salt; amour slips into ruma and returns with a foreign cadence; syllables braid, unbraid, leave a trace. The tongue holds two registers, one public, one subterranean, each sentence bearing a second current that warms the mouth. Even the jolt of a sudden image carries a shimmer of anticipation, a small, bright yes that precedes the pulse.
Outside, the estuary brightens. The fog lifts in a slow consent. The figure reaches the water’s edge and stands; the surface offers depth that draws the gaze. Air moves across the skin with a fine, articulate touch. A steady warmth persists at the center of the chest. The chambers within the skull retain their polish, their layered iridescence. Images remain and sustain the structure that bears them.
The path continues along the margin. The ground accepts each step. The name returns and settles. The horizon holds. The day opens. The mind continues its craft, laying down another layer with a calm, deliberate hand. The surface gleams. The current runs. One walks again into the corridor, eager for the next quickening, the next lucid shimmer, the next bright exercise of fear carried out with a kind of joy.
The feed refreshes like a mouth that learns
to open cleanly, quick, without a sound;
a thumb conducts the choir of small returns,
each mercy shaved to fit a smaller round.
We trade in shocks that keep the lights awake,
in outrage salted just enough to sell;
a million little dawns we never make,
one endless noon that rings a private bell.
The good arrives already pre-forgiven,
the bad accrues a credit we can spend;
we live as if the sum were all we’re given,
and scroll until the numbers call it end.
The
stars ask no questions.
They simply burn.
But I, being human, must turn even the burning into parable.
My soul is a poor spectroscope,
but still I aim it skyward.
The pale visitor rose above my bed,
her frozen gaze a weight upon my chest,
high breasts like moonlit ruins overhead,
the shadowed grove between her white skin pressed,
each whispered sigh a promise I might fall,
her laughter threading silence through my head,
and drew my failing soul toward the pall.
I could not move, could not refuse her claim,
her hand a frost upon my weary heart,
each breath a tide that whispered only shame,
the world dissolved, its mercy torn apart,
I felt the dark invite me to the deep,
its cold enough to steal my final sleep,
and leave no echo of my broken start.
In sleep, my mind is a planet orbiting itself.
Dream is the dark matter that keeps me from flying apart.
It cannot be seen.
But without it, nothing would cohere.
Like Aquinas’ unmoved mover, it does not glow.
But it grips.
