I feel sick, so sick of myself.
I don't exist: calloused layers of shell.
This world is sick. War is more real than Hell.
Does good love exist? Is it more real than Death?
What will you love when nothing is left?
The soil is poisoned. Seeds freed from cycles.
Purge odious life.
Tears salt the Earth from true peace disciples.
No pain. No struggle. No strife.
Behind the mask there is nothing.
Behind my eyes there is nothing.
Before my eyes there is nothing.
Embracing void. Immortality.
Cannot be destroyed. Empty.
Embrace the truth.
Tranquility.
I quit. I quit pretending.
Pretending I am not everything. At last,
I find annihilation
in you.

I fell for him like twilight falls to night
But dawn demanded I let go too soon
He held my soul beneath the softest light
Now silence hums a hollow, distant tune

He left, and still the air feels sharp and thin
Like breathing shards of glass with every sigh
A day has passed, it tears me from within
The kind of ache that doesn’t let you cry

He was the bloom before my brutal frost
A warmth I cupped with hands too full of fear
I broke my heart to prove I’d bear the cost
What’s right still rips, and love won’t disappear

My throat is wrapped in wires, cold and tight
A fence of grief that shocks with every breath
My pillow swells with storms I lose each night
Each sob a small rehearsal for my death

I knew he’d be the wound I’d never close
The ghost I’d chase in every midnight prayer
He was the poem my silence only knows
The empty in the room when no one’s there

He said “It’s over”, and the stars turned pale
The sky collapsed in bruises none could feel
Purple kissed blue, and sorrow spilled to teal
A palette mixed in love we couldn’t scale

I bowed to grief, a creature made of glass
Who shattered in the light he left behind
I hid the truth, we’d never truly last
But begged the clock to keep us more entwined

I’ll search for you in others, soft and slow
In crooked smiles and eyes I wish were yours
But every face becomes a deeper blow
Another door that leads to empty floors

If one more hour meant breaking all again
I’d bleed through time to taste him in the pain
To burn in him, to drown in what has been
I’d choose the fall and never curse the rain

I would whisper it once more

And I would whisper it all once more
You were the one who slipped away
I’m losing sleep, forgetting how to eat
Like I don’t know how to move my feet

The songs I used to play to feel okay
Now echo with the shadow of your name
You turned my favorite melodies to gray
And healing hurts when music feels like blame

You are the best thing that happened to me
But love, it seems, was never meant to be
So I broke my heart because you were kind
I broke my heart because it’s what’s right

Now it will take me years to find your face
In fleeting glances, strangers passing by
I’ll search for you in every time and place
And ache when all I see is not your eyes

Yet even so, I’d do it all again
For one more moment through all the pain
If time with you meant heartbreak anew
I’d choose every scar
Just to stay with you

The kind of ache that crying seems like fun
The kind of ache that cry’s had tears of its own
A mental breakdown for every 10min that move along  
But we’ll bleed in silence into the night for the words that said:

“The kind of ache that doesn’t let you cry”
Cause purple blue skies are only found in your eyes
A purple blue sky is teal in our eyes

By: Zoulaikha

It isn’t easy to walk, gravity weighs.
The biosuits lock the mind
in a narrow space.

An interpretive blow is crucial:
Does being on the other side of the mirror
truly want it, or only think it does?

A thumb drives into the right temple.
The heart pumps hectoliters of warm liquid.
Colours, sounds, tensions in the eternal swirl.

Delay in processing—eighty milliseconds
it isn’t a flaw.
It takes that long for all the cogs to turn.

Everything I do now is already in the past.
Decisions made long ago spit me out
into this reality with some name.

I am the last, but not least,
in the collective dream and blink of time.

Minds sway like golden grain, ready to be cut.
I can stand up or lie on the ground.

I walk—
toward the next stumble,
the next wound, and maybe healing.

Insights glow like yellow lanterns,
giving me some light.

No justification, no understanding.
My self-awareness is not a cozy couch.

One day,
I will stop existing, and I accept that.
I’m just afraid to leave those who still love me.

Every day, I open my reality:
I wake up.
I feel.
I choose.
I decide—
knowing so many others
are crying behind the scenes,
and their trembling is raw.

Pain isn’t consolation—
it reinforces the structure of fragility
when the towers are crumbling.

At the core, we return,
squeezing black-and-white struggles
into our veins, into our memories.

To the only home
we never left
our own body.
The first and the last.

Sorrow fades away
in service to others' pain.
Life finds its true path.

There is romance found in ingratiation – chaste doilies suffering implicitly beneath the burden of unclean bowls. Here’s one, illuminated as a pinball machine when you rattle that dung-brown stain about its shrivelled axis. Above its shaky pupil, a cataract of steam squirms about in unalarming routine.

So many nights I adulterated merely for lack of better days were given credence by the gimpy sun, turned away with its blouse undone, and ****** back to the chalkboard. Somewhere along the past few days I must have become bedridden, indentured to prickly sponge baths by that ****** tongue.

How I’d like to stay sedated now – another day of inoculation becoming an alibi for the adhesion of this numbness inducted to the soft-boiled meat of my temples, combing out my shoulder blades, running down my legs.

Stupidly I almost feel a sense of superiority in not learning any faces among the indiscrete convoys of whitish heads popping in now and then, with the subordinate arousal of stiff knuckles, or other things compressed inward by their own come-hither fervor.

“You talk too much, you worry me to death…”

How quickly we’ve been brought down,
On bended knees, crying please,
Stop the disease, we’ll take off the crown,
To our lives; listening to lies, mantras of self-help tease,
Hope beyond now. Clear the mental fog; refocus.

I’ve always wondered what pushes Sisyphus to keep pushing the rock,
The struggles it took to bring it on top.
Just to find it at the bottom, and again he pushes it up
I’d like to think he rides the rock
When it rolls down from the mountain top,
I hope he enjoys the gust of wind as he sled down, carefree
And that he was… genuinely content.
And it was actually worth it,
To spend his eternity striving to be happy.

May 31st of 2018 11:30 pm

~~~~~

At this hour I think of how
I was told of daddy's death
Immediately it speared me through
And I cried out with all my breath.

I was already in my bed
Mom only a door away
I couldn't go and comfort her
I couldn't walk at all that day.

I don't remember going to sleep
Ɓut I think I had a dream
I knelt by bedside, red eyes weep
Prayed my father was redeemed

All around me there was dust
Ashes scattered 'cross the floor
My tattered mind I could not trust
Got up, went through the door

Next thing I knew I was outside
Ànd I held a silver vase
I recall how hard I cried
Tears were streaming down my face.

Then I was in full darknes there
No moon lit my silent way
There was no delusion of
What had swallowed night and day

Then, the devil on his throne
Sulfur lit with horrid n̈ail
I looked all over hades stones
There was inside a mighty gale!

I woke up! I held on strong
For as long as I could last
Now I know that I was wrong
But I knew the dye was cast.

My eyes filled my tearstained couch
Relief filled up my smitten heart
I'd find my dad in heaven now

We would, in heaven, never part!


SoulSurvivor aka
Write of Passage aka
Invisible inc

Catherine Jarvis
2025