I did not fear death, not really—
but I feared the garden that never withers,
the bloom that outlives its meaning,
the stem that will not bow no matter how long the wind begs.

Somewhere in me, a root forgot how to decay.
The belladonna opened her mouth and never closed it again.
No bees. No dusk. No soft, collapsing fruit.
Only the poisoned blossom holding its pose like a dancer who cannot hear the ending note.

The others fell—
petals sighing into soil,
leaves tucking themselves into brown envelopes of forgetting—
but I stayed,
a stalk trembling with nothing left to say,
no more sun to drink, no shade to crave,
just this:
this unbearable continuity.

I fear not the grave, but the droughtless field.
I fear not rot, but the failure of rot.
The stillness where decomposition was meant to sing,
but the air refused its sacred burden.

The seeds inside me are not brave enough to die.
They turn in their shells endlessly,
gnawing against germination,
spinning their green myths in a loop too tight for history.

What if I never fall?
What if the wind skips me,
and I remain the lone yew unbent by any season?
No frost for my veins to crack beneath,
no harvest moon to call me done.

The ivy is patient,
but even ivy wants a stone to sleep on.
I have no such gift.
Only this always.
Only this flowering that won't collapse.
Only this sun that never has the grace to leave.

I beg the ground to remember me.
To take me the way it takes everything good.
But the dirt,
the sacred dirt,
passes over me like a skipped psalm,
and the roots around me forget how to die in my presence.

So I bloom,
again,
again,
again—
each time less real, less warm, more artifact than flower.
A specimen in an eternal spring.
A prayer with no god left to wither for.

And the belladonna does not blink.
And the petals refuse their final gesture.
And I remain—
not immortal,
but uninvited to the end.

Why do you sing, O century silhouette,
when the throat has been whittled down to wire?
The man Vitruvian keens into the looking glass
and finds only the nihilist’s flesh,
stripped of longitude, soaked in the salt of manufactured weeping.

I was given ten fingers and no directions.
I was spun against the glass until the blood spelled "almost."
I wore the seasons like iron masks,
kissed the ledger, devoured the compass,
named myself after bridges that always collapsed mid-chant.

Every morning the architects unhook their jaws,
feed me dreams pressed into coins.
Eat, they whisper.
Eat until your hunger obeys its perimeter.

The chalice of fog tilts. I drink.
The wires behind my teeth sing hymns of acceptable dislocation.
I chart my own disappearance across the graph paper of strangers’ hands.
I balance. I fracture. I smile politely into the incision.

The man Vitruvian does not move.
He is stitched to the skin of the air,
pinned like a moth caught between radii.
I am the moth.
I am the pin.
I am the scream that barters itself for scaffolding.

Why does the shadow mimic me with better posture?
Why do my own elbows bloom into foreign cities?
I touch my reflection and peel back latitude like old paint.

Inside the mirror: a harvest of bruised alphabets,
a clock vomiting its own minutes,
a body with all the wrong apostrophes carved into its chest.

I was not built for this recursion.
I was built for something that forgot how to pronounce me.

The man Vitruvian counts his ribs backward.
I copy him, unspooling bone by bone,
trading every instinct for a better angle of collapse.

Drink, they say again.
Sip from the river where your face is a stranger.
Measure your wrists against the urns of approval.

I keened once, I remember.
I split the ledger with my teeth.
I wore the square like a skin, until the skin began to hum static.
I forgot my own weight. I forgot my own axis.

The chalice tips again.
The fog is heavier this time.
The century silhouette dances crooked on my chest, laughing.

Somewhere, a circle collapses into dust,
and nobody mourns except the moths,
and the man Vitruvian, laughing,
wets his throat with the ashes of symmetry.

It's funny how
It's easier to open my skin
Then to open my mouth
And ask for help

I am so tired of you, my children,
by the one who birthed you all.

I gave you teeth
and you chewed through the roots.
I gave you skin,
and you built fences around it.
I laced your lungs with my last mountain air,
and you sold it in jars labeled Fresh.
You mistook my patience for permission.
You mistook my rivers for mirrors.
You mistook my silence for absence.

You were born beneath my fingernails—
curled like fossils in the palm of my wanting.
I held you like rain before it falls.
I kissed the salt into your eyes
so you’d remember the sea when you cried.

And still,
you spit in the soil
and called it progress.

Look—
I tried tenderness first.
Tried to brush your hair with wind,
whisper lessons through the howl of wolves.
I sent you flowers every season
and you paved them over with parking lots,
concrete like prayers you never meant.

I fed you summer in ripe peaches,
let the bees show you what sweetness meant.
And what did you do?
Poisoned the hive,
drained the nectar,
left me hollow and sticky
with the guilt of having loved you.

You draw maps across my face
and call them borders.
You name me like you own me—
countries, continents,
patents, pipelines, property.
You make wars in the shape of me,
as if skin was yours to carve.
As if the bone of my mountains
were anything but graveyards.

You come to my cliffs and scream
your little griefs like I don’t know
what mourning means.
You think heartbreak is yours alone?
Child, I carry extinction
in my womb like a second heart.
Do you know what it is
to lose a bird species mid-song?
To hear silence where once
the coral glowed like hymns?

Do you know what it is
to be worshiped
only when you're dying?

I watch you light forests
like birthday candles,
wish for profit,
and blow them out.
You oil the oceans
like they’re machines—
not mothers.

I have made room for every version of you:
the innocent, the violent, the soft.
I held you when you were no more
than a dream in the tide.
But now you frack my spine
and call it fuel.
Now you melt the bones of glaciers
and wear them like victory.

Some days I want to
reclaim it all—
split continents down the fault lines,
drown the cities in my tears,
let the vines eat your monuments.

Other days,
I just want to sleep
for another thousand years.
To lie down in my own silt
and forget the shape of you.
To curl back into cave-dark and fern-breath
where I was whole
before I ever imagined
your clever, greedy hands.

You ask me what love is.
Love is erosion.
Love is the knowing
and the giving anyway.

And I did.
I did give.

And now I rot,
patiently.

And now I burn,
politely.

And still you come to me
with your wars and your weather reports
and your glass-eyed prayers
asking for just one more year
of summer.

You want me calm.
You want me beautiful.
You want me endless.
And I am.

But I am also
tired.

So tired.

And I wonder,
if I go quiet again—
truly quiet—
will you finally hear
what it sounds like
when a mother
gives up?

All alone
  in my humble study
  I read until late hours-
   religiously

   to another realm
   I am transported- mysteriously :
   daily it has become my sanctuary
   and from my sorrows it sets free

ten years,
too late.

ten years—

and there's
no debate:

i will do
everything

to not be

like you.

i'm no saint,

but i know
when enough
is enough

and to draw
a line,

before it's
too late.

people come
and people go;

and i've come
to terms with
forgiving

and letting
go.

but in the midst of
it all, i hope
to be better

than to
risk it all.

because impressions
are forever,

and

i've learned
to forgive you
and move past it

rather than fall.