Why Bother?

I build, rebuild, in cold, precise refrain,
each proof a link within a tightening chain,
the forms align, immaculate, severe,
while every pulse grows fainter, harder, dear,
no passage cut, no mercy in the scheme,
each theorem trims the flesh to fit the dream,
and leaves me bound within a lucid pain.

The will inclines toward rest that will not start,
a hush that gathers, intimate, apart,
yet reason keeps its vigil, stern, awake,
each axiom another clasp to take,
till even longing learns to speak in law,
and drafts its end with disciplined awe,
a final line inscribed across the heart.

Periodically Tabled

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.

Blue Light Psalm

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
All too easily.

O modern love –
So public, so lonely –
We touch the world constantly
And rarely feel it touch back.

Why Horror?

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.

 

Drip-Fed

The feed refreshes with a fish-mouth flick,
a gill of glow gulping the plankton-news;
each thumb a tiny thaumaturge of quick
resurrections tailored to attention's shoes.
The screen unsleeps. The pixels pearl and preen.
A thousand notifications pollinate the nerve.
The eye becomes an aye becomes a machine
for granting every appetite a verb.

We breakfast on catastrophes in flakes.
We spoon up spoon-fed spoons of secondhand alarm.
The algorithm algorhythms through our wakes,
counting pulse by pulse, harm by purchased charm.
A headline hedges. A rumor ruminates.
A fact fractures into faction, then into feed.
Meaning molts. Significance migrates.
Every need grows knees and learns to breed.

The scroll unrolls its scrollwork. Soulwork too.
Each gesture genuflects before the glass.
The present tense grows tents within the view,
whole cities of attention built to pass.
An outrage enters salted, cured, preserved,
fit for long consumption, shelf-life grief.
A grief becomes a brief. A brief gets served.
The sentence seeks conviction and relief.

The good appears with absolution bundled,
shrink-wrapped in smiles and frictionless acclaim.
The bad arrives leveraged, stacked, and fundled,
a blackened dividend payable in blame.
We spend it lavishly. We spend it twice.
We spend tomorrow's outrage yesterday.
The soul accepts promotional sacrifice.
The conscience clips a coupon on the way.

And noon expands beyond all natural measure.
No evening enters. Shadow loses trade.
The clock develops chronic overstature.
Time itself becomes a brightly lit arcade.
A million dawns remain unborn, unfathered,
their gold still folded somewhere in the seam.
Around the bell of self the hours gather,
iron filings circling a private dream.

The metrics bloom. The numerals propagate.
Every count recounts the counter of the count.
I feel my inner weather bureaucrate,
turning rainfall into figures to amount.
My laughter leaves receipts.
My sorrows audit clean.
Even memory invoices its retreats.
Even longing asks what longing means.

Then comes the hush beneath accumulation,
the quiet sum beneath the summed-up sum.
A cemetery hidden in computation,
a ledger where all columns finally come.
Each swipe a little sanding of the spirit.
Each click a clerk inscribing further loss.
I hear the arithmetic inherit
the burden once assigned to god or cross.

The feed refreshes. I compress with it.
A mutual haunting. A mirrored consumption.
Bit by bit by bit by bit by bit,
a feast of gradual self-assumption.
The screen keeps offering immortal little morsels,
bright sugar discs of never-enough light.
I taste the future whitening into fossils.
I watch the day ossify into night.

I must set down the thumb that served as stylus.
And close the mouth that learned to feed on glow.
The bell keeps ringing, though it rings behind us.
The river totals what the banks still owe.
Tonight I choose an exit over endless entry.
Tonight I leave the ledger to itself.
I shelve my name among the unsent century,
extinguish the account,
and join the shelf.