. PROLOGUE: The Ink that Bled First .

Before the flood, there was the scratch.

I wrote her name before I heard it.
Etched it into matchbooks and unpaid parking tickets,
into napkins left to wilt beside diner coffee.
Didn’t know it was hers,
only that something in my blood
kept drawing spirals
like a mouth preparing to speak
and failing.

She came not like the storm—
that would’ve been kinder.
She came like the   pause   before lightning,
where the whole world inhales
and prays for impact
without knowing it.

She wore no mask,
just twenty-seven kinds of silence.
Each with a different taste.
The kind you hum against.
The kind you mistake for music.
The kind that opens old doors
without touching the ****.

And I—
I was all vessel,
too brittle to hold,
too stubborn to break.
I greeted her like a warning label,
half-believing she was a dare
taped to the back of my tongue.

We didn’t meet.
We collided,
in a room with no lights and too many windows.
Our names grew fangs there.
Our shadows learned each other
by shape, not consent.

That was before the language turned to teeth.
Before the poems began to rot.
That was when I thought I still had skin
left to lose.


. ACT I: The Bloom and the Snare .

I found her mouth behind my ribs.

Scene I — The Recognition Rattle
She didn’t arrive. She distorted.
Bent light like a bad omen or a god’s afterthought.
The room changed temperature first.
Then came the words—not hers, not mine—
just words that looked at me
like a dog baring teeth
but wagging anyway.

She said, “You smell like sleep and cowardice.”
I said, “You sound like my mother’s third divorce.”
We laughed. Or maybe we bled.

She wore black like it owed her money.
I wore whatever I found on the floor.
We fit like broken clock hands.
Always pointing, never ticking.

Scene II — The Body as Vow
We touched like liars do—palms first, then mouths.
She bit my lip like she was testing for gold.
We didn’t speak. We intoned.
Language became threadbare,
so we stitched with sweat and gritted teeth.

She whispered: “Don’t love me. Just listen.”
And I did.

Scene III — The Warning in Bloom
Later, drunk on silence and floorboards,
she asked what I believed in.
I said: “The moment before something breaks.”
She nodded like that was a prayer.
Then carved her name into my thigh
with a finger wet from her own mouth.


. ACT II: The Beast at the Banquet .

We fed each other to the silence.

Scene I — Dinner in the House of Collapse
Autumn by calendar, July's basement by feel.
Forks gleamed like threats. A roast petrified mid-prayer.

"You always flinch before the truth lands", she said.
“You rehearse abandonment like it’s a lullaby,” I replied.
Then the chandelier blinked out.

Scene II — Rot in the Hallway Mirror
She undressed like peeling back time.
Touched the mirror, not me.
The reflection flinched. I did not.

Scene III — The Mouth of the Beast
We ****** on the floor
because the bed remembered too much.
She asked: “Is this love, or camouflage?”
I didn’t answer.
Not with her thighs around my ribs
and my own name caught in her teeth.

Scene IV — The Feast Turns
We tried normal.
Brunch, films, civility.
But politeness became the sharpest knife.
Eventually, we ate each other
with trembling mouths.
Quietly. Lovingly. As if it had always been the plan.

. ACT III: The Drift of the Saints .

You spoke, and the oceans went blind.

Fragment I — Absence Wears Her Face
She was everywhere except where I could touch.
Silence came not as peace, but as surveillance.

Fragment II — Shrine Built from Debris
I made an altar from the trash.
Prayed like a man with no god,
but a very specific ache.

Fragment III — Dream in Her Accent
She came to me in fever,
dripping paint from her fingernails.
I left you my hunger. Don’t you dare starve it.

Fragment IV — Psalm of the Drowned
2:17 a.m. diner. Ketchup napkin elegies.
Even the cigarettes burned quietly.

Fragment V — Saltwater Requiem
I whispered her name into a conch.
It whispered back:
You were real. That is the most unbearable miracle of all.


. ACT IV: The Wound We Baptized .

I made her a cathedral of spit and spitshine.

Scene I — The Naming of the Thing That Has No Name
I stopped resisting the haunting.
Let her smear her ash-lip gospel across my walls.

Scene II — Baptism by Refuse
Tore down the Rockwell print. Hung rusted nails instead.
Cooked sadness on instinct.
Baptized myself in the tub, chanting her jokes.

Scene III — Integration
Healing isn’t light. It’s grime.
It’s finding her hair and not crying.
Just breathing. Once. Then again.

Scene IV — Resurrection in the Shape of Distortion
I folded the photograph into a paper airplane.
Somewhere, we are still unspeakable.
Here—we are real. And that is enough.


. EPILOGUE: Rockwell’s Jawbone .

I painted the dream, but I used her bones.

The roast is cold. The table is set.
A dog chews the Constitution.

A Rockwell print burns in the sink.
Outside, a torn flag ***** like a trapped angel.

My America had her in it—
her ash, her rage, her hymn.

I hang the painting on the wall.
It drips. It pulses. It howls.
I leave the door open. Just a crack.
Let the myth wander back,

if it dares.


. [END] .