M0NK

[image] Every addiction begins as a servant and ends as a #fiend. Mine arrived with good manners, asked little, and proved useful company on difficult nights. By the time I recognised the master, the servant had my keys. #vss365

[image] #forgiveness is the heart's consent not uttered first by tongue or mind. I know it when, recalling all, no ancient echo wakes behind. The thorn may linger in the flesh, yet cease to press, or to accuse; what I thought I must forgive becomes the grief I do not choose. #vss365

[image] The house had forgotten laughter long before it forgot the dead. Ivy rehearsed its slow conquest of the stone. Each autumn, one candle appeared in the upper window. No hand was seen to place it there. No hand was needed. Devotions survive their devotees, #evermore. #vss365

[image] The most #stunning thing I ever witnessed was not beautiful. It was the moment I understood that what I had been holding onto had already let go of me. The truth arrives in the wrong hour, wearing the face of someone you trusted. #vss365

[image] Before they named me I was whole, no mixture, no conceit. #unalloyed, the unsplit soul the dark found fit to keep. They brought their remedies and left, the wound stayed what it was. I am the thing that owns its cleft, the silence and its cause. #vss365

[image] The Sandman walks where life can't tread, carrying sand that whispers of #divine, I lay my soul inside his bed, and let him pour memory through every line. #vss365

[image] Every morning it begins before I do. Before memory. Before I decide, it has already chosen a day for me. Years spent forgiving it for loving what I could no longer hold, for remembering what I begged to forget. I am tired of losing that argument. I do not want to have a heart.

[image] I don't write to find you. I know where you linger. No lighthouse steers your steps. You only see those who shine. I don't shine. If we meet again, I'll see through you as you see through me. When you quit coming, I gave up waiting. #poetry

[image] The #villain of every story I have lived wore my face. By the time I recognized him, he had my voice. Most of his work was already done. #vss365

[image] There is a kindness in between, the pause before the step. I stood where I had always been and found I had not left. The threshold asked for nothing more than that I know I'm here. I put my hand against the door and felt myself appear. #poetry

[image] They said he fell. The window remained open. The meeting continued. By evening, his name had been removed from the minutes. #defenestrate #vss365

[image] Darkness handed a piece of #fruit grown in a garden no map shows; I took one bite and felt the root of hunger hell itself won't know. It didn't taste of sin or shame, just embers dressed as honeyed sweet; a private, unrepentant flame, too dark for hell to ever eat. #vss365

[image] Few of them land. Most evaporate before they reach anything. Rarely see the ones that fall. You find them later, in the cloth, in the grain, in the way a room smells after the unsaid finally leaves it. Words fall like rain. Only some of them find ground. #FoxProse @FoxProse

[image] #evenfall is the hour they keep, when shutters close and voices blend; they bless the dusk and call it sleep, as if all hungers found an end. I wait where no shadows stay; the night is deepest before dawn, when light arrives to strip away the dark the others carried on. #vss365

[image] An honest #appraisal of a life takes longer than the life itself. You need distance. You need the ones who knew you to be gone. You need the silence that comes after, when the only voice left is the one you least wanted to hear. ♠️ #vss365

[image] No warning comes before I act, I plan the hour, not just rage; this calm called #evil is in fact a patience built to fit the cage. I keep no anger in my hands, never raise my voice or blame; I build the order no one plans, a face no memory can name. #vss365

[image] The sun stood at its highest point and began, at once, its surrender. I have always thought there was a gothic elegance in that. The brightest things are already fading when they shine the most. #bionicanadian @bionicanadian

[image] Three crows on a gravestone. One flew away. Then another. The third remained until dark. #Quietus. Night took the witness. #vss365

[image] I found a #garden where nothing had died properly. Roses opened with blackened petals, their perfume sweet enough to make my teeth ache. Beneath them, the soil breathed. It moved whenever I stopped watching. I left the gate open. It had grown around my footprints. #vss365

[image] This stranded cord I won't cut; the fraying is its own rite now. Worn threads keep the wound half-shut, a knot in place of every vow. The frayed have ceremony: to hold what breaks, name who's gone. I tend the altar I have made of what we were, and carry on. #FoxProse @FoxProse

[image] The sea does not #embrace the cliff. It keeps returning until resistance becomes another shape of surrender. Nature has never confused patience with mercy. #vss365

[image] Every morning the moon appeared in a different place. Rivers changed direction, names migrated between people while they slept. The only #novel thing was a book that stubbornly kept the same account of my life. #vss365

[image] No barren stone has troubled me, nor field that yielded little worth; I fear the richer soil may be too eager in its patient birth. For every root that seeks the sun, another learns the darker art; the #fertile earth makes room for one, then quietly prepares the heart. #vss365

[image] The hawk makes no complaint of wind nor oak of winter's hardest cast; #chaos never asked to win, it only asks what shape will last. Let the loudest heavens break, let lost kingdoms drift apart; the deepest roots are those that take their measure from the hidden heart. #vss365

[image] She had the look of someone who'd been on this train before, on other trains, in other lives. Doesn't wait to arrive. Only moving, the way some do when stillness is no longer an option. Wrapped in eternity, she has mistaken motion for distance. #Amatory @Amatoryq

[image] I preferred the dark. It concealed unfinished things. At #dawn, every omission returned: the unanswered letter, the unpainted wall, the empty chair. Night forgives. Dawn keeps records. #vss365

[image] Who knows your secrets? No one, I used to think. Then I watched a stranger read my face before I spoke. Secrets leak. Into habits. Into posture. Into the words we avoid. By the time they reach language, they have usually been visible for years. #FoxProse @FoxProse

[image] The door at the end of the hall had no handle. It had never needed one. She stood before it every night, the same distance, the same dark. The #pull was constant. She was not. #vss365

[image] I climbed to reach the sky's own throne, found the air too thin to hold; what rose in flesh, #ascends as bone and dies before the tale is told. No hand recorded what was lost, no witness marked the rise; the summit only knows the cost and keeps it silent from the skies. #vss365

[image] Their divine prism splits the white of truth into what it conceals- colours bleed from single light, nothing whole survives the seals. I stood where the prism bends God's word to seven wounds- what enters whole the prism rends, truth comes in broken tunes. #FoxProse @FoxProse

[image] She didn't break it. Stone doesn't break that easily. It endures, indifferent, through all that softens saves. Fallen upon a heart of stone is to learn that cruelty doesn't require intent. The mountain never noticed. That was the worst of it. #fairytalepoets @fairytalepoets

[image] I read the #grain of the wood the way my father taught me. Press here, it gives. Press there, it holds. I never learned to read people the same way, and they never forgave me for it. #vss365

[image] The scale won't care which way it tips, it holds what's weighed and nothing more, no virtue in the middle sits, just weight, and what you're #balanced for. #vss365

[image] Named was blood that felled the king, and kept the tale through fire; I inherited neither crown nor ring, but names that would not tire. The witches spoke; the kingdoms bled, while time made legend of the scar; I carry ghosts among my dead, and #toil beneath the star. #vss365

[image] A poet sat down at the keys and played through the dark by degrees. The notes hit the air, the room held its prayer, and the silence itself fell to #swoon. #vss365

[image] #fleeting brushed the windowpane, a moth-wing touch, a breath of rain; it lit the dust, then slipped away, and left the room to its decay. I raised my hand and caught a gleam already thinning into air; the world was whole within that seam, then ordinary everywhere. #vss365

[image] I have learned to consume the night in small pieces. A cup of something warm. A page. Rain, if I am lucky. I do not look at the clock. I take the hours one at a time, like a penance I have stopped expecting to end. #Amatory @Amatoryq

[image] She picked the berries the way she did everything- quietly, without ceremony. I watched her hands. I did not know I was memorising them. The berries come back every year. I know which ones are ready. I cannot tell you how I know. That is the closest she gets to still being here.

[image] A pressure builds below my ribs that swallows every rising urge; I feel the floor begin to bend, a scream with nowhere left to surge. My teeth are sewn behind my eyes, the dark has learned to hold me down; every thought I speak turns lies to pull me somewhere I can drown.

[image] #Temptation doesn't knock at night, it waits till mind grows tired, then offers rest disguised as light, and calls itself required. I treat it now like a regret, not sin, not fruit, no garden lies, a thing I never can forget before I close my eyes. #vss365

[image] I have crossed oceans of time to find the shore where all I was has gone. Waves have taken what was mine; and grasp at what the tide moved on. The self I was grows hard to name; the mirror holds a stranger's face. I fed the dark, and it became the only thing that knows my place.

[image] She was built to be sacred, and I didn't always know how to be in the presence of that. I loved her the way the untrained love what is holy - imperfectly, often from the wrong distance, rarely certain of the protocol. She forgave the distance. She always did. #FoxProse @FoxProse

[image] #midnight is an audit. The noise has closed for business. No meetings remain, no errands, no excuses. The mind opens the ledger and begins itemizing the day: what was done, what was avoided, and what can no longer be blamed on lack of time. #vss365

[image] What leaves me #haunted has no face, no grave, no mark of where it laid; it is the outline of a place I nearly reached before it frayed. The unlived life needs no permission, it comes unbid, it knows the door; I am its only exhibition, the house it haunts forevermore. #vss365

[image] The first lie was small. Small enough to rescue a friendship, spare a reputation, preserve a marriage. Everything after that was architecture. The truth could not #undo it. #vss365

[image] There is a #magnetism in the dark that I know, in the pull of the thing that was never released, in the field that no distance has weakened or ceased, in the echo that keeps charging the longer I go. #vss365

[image] The #road remembers every turn, it holds the pace of feet that stayed, carries forward what we learn, a motion nothing can degrade. No map foretold the way it bent, no signpost named where we would go; every mile we crossed still meant we'd chosen it, and chose to know. #vss365

[image] quiet after. just her breathing and a #tailwind against the window, like the whole night finally exhaled. #vss365

[image] Who gave me the right to grade your #shame like it's mine to score, when I've buried worse under better lighting? Shame doesn't rank by size - I just never let mine sit long enough to compare notes with anyone else's. #vss365

[image] The last breath keeps its slow rite; it will not hurry, will not mourn. To exhale and release the night is all that dying has sworn. I watched from inside the vast; the world grew quiet, then clear. What extinction takes at last is everything that was here. #FoxProse @FoxProse