I hate how many words I've wasted
Just thinking of you
How many poems pile
The washed away blood
In my bathroom tiles
Which have haunted me
Since I first spoke your name
A title so mistaken
It has a different ring to it
Nowadays

my brain doesn’t understand
that we have no right to exist.
and still, it conjures her —
lips burning from the kiss
where I forget
where I end
and she begins.

A man's heart paralysis,
Has only one catalyst—
When he gives his strong, beating heart
To a girl with a deadly dart.

She’ll push him away,
Leave him out like a stray.
She thought she was sparing him pain,
Hoping he'd love again one day.

Years go by—
He still can’t deny,
His mind stays haunted,
She’s all he ever wanted.

So the riddle now goes:
When a lover turns foe,
What drives the last nail in the coffin?
It’s the woman he was lost in.

Now here he lies,
In a room full of saddened sighs.
She walks through the parlor doors,
Tears crashing to the floor.

Aching at the last goodbye,
Knowing she caused this man to die.

C.K. Orzen

They say I slept like  
I was in a shallow grave,
Still warm, but rigid.
eyes glazed over..

I tried to wake myself up,
But as I looked down,
Chills evaporated through me.

I slept like death, my pillow
A grave stone of dreams.
Tucked in beneath the
Shallow entombment
of slumber.

Yet, upon my resurrection,
I feel like I’d never even
Sewn my eyes shut.
As sunlight seers my retina.

I walk into the light, dead on my feet..

His heart was yours.
They  thought so too.

It's the love you find.
In old haunted rooms.

Only now he's not getting through.
There's something harrowing.

About this haunting.
As everybody screams.

All the broken promises.
Hindered by regrets.

Still he haunts.
Your lonely heart.

As goosebumps spring.
Against your neck.

Wondering if it was something you did.
Wondering  if it was something you said.

Your met with silence.
As it turns violent.

As an echo.
Is heard of him crying.

Years go by.
Without words unspoken.

Till he becomes a ghost,
In the graveyard of your hopes.

She waltzed in wearing lavender -

not the bruised blue hue of dried buds,

but the soft, delicate shade that makes you forget

poison can be pastel

and alive.

The cerulean seas of her eyes

surveyed me with a crocodilian smirk

an undertow ready to clench and drag

for its own amusement

She smiled like silk,

shiny, delicate, costly

as she handed me a cedar latched spice box.

Inside

red cords, scissors

pressed flowers so fragile they'd shatter

with a whisper

and a single letter sprinkled

with cayenne

sealed with red lipstick

too heavy to open.

"Time doesn't belong to you," She whispered

like it was a flirtation

like my hours were hers

to unwrap

to discard

She kissed my questioning forehead

soft, sealing, dismissive,

answered nothing

just reached for my hands

with perfectly manicured cold fingers

I gasped awake

my mouth full of cinnamon

dry and hot

a goodbye I didn't choose caught in my throat

that I prayed I'd never have to speak.

She's reappeared now and again

in the corners of mirrors,

fond of the elevator's reflective surround

and the hammered copper coffee jar

that stays open like a lifeline.

always twirling her ashen ringlets

waiting? warning?

When I glimpse her, I open the lace covered windows

and let the sun reclaim the shadows -

until even her perfume forgets my name.

can they see the ghosts in the gaps between each blink
in the space in which they’ve claimed their own ?

My stomach does that thing—
you know, when the ghost
rests a hand there.
Not a hit.
Just a hush,
and fingernails.

Like it never left.
Like I’m the one
who forgot to feed it.

It’s always at dawn.
Or mid-laugh.
Or in line at the dollar store—
buying nail polish I’ll chew off by Tuesday
and an eyelash curler,
just in case he sees me
from across a decade.

Then you paraglide in—
a salesman who knew I’d be home.
And the floor remembers
what I worked so hard to forget.

And I gasp—like I tripped.
But I didn’t.
I remembered.

I remembered
the ghost
you left me to raise alone.

Like:
“Hi. Just passing through.
Don’t stress on my behalf.”

I nod.
And I don’t.
I keep chewing the same nail.
My eyelashes are curled.
My stomach still does that thing.

You know the one.

I have been spiraling down                                                                    ­                                 
Clawing at the muddy ground                                                           ­                                                              
 I pull myself up just to sink         
                                                                              ­                              
Always hanging on the brink                                                                       ­                                                    
  If I'd call for help, who'd hear                                                                     ­                                                  
  I'm all alone & my minds unclear                                                                     ­                                                    
 I scream in silence, so it seems                                                                    ­                                              
Haunted every night by dreams                                                                      ­                                                
   What is real & what is not                                                                        ­  
My pulse races, nerves are taut                                                             ­                                          
                                                                                                              
White knuckling through this life                                                             ­                                                                 ­                      
  Filled with pain, the future's blight                                                           ­                                                                 ­                                                                 ­                                      
I am a human stain bleeding out                                                              ­                                              
                                                                ­                                                 
 No tunnel light, just doubt                                                                     ­                                                     
I 'm dead inside & life is hell                                                                      ­                                                 
This is the hand I have been dealt

….
….
The door drew fate.
A face amidst the darkness?
My anxiety inflates.
…
…
A passing day draws in darkness,
each day an eye sees me.
My senses urge, trying to decree;
For It finally began,
It now watches, it can now see.

…
…
I have fled my place,
But will it ever follow?
I closed the lights,
lifted them in darkness,
My feelings ever hollow.
…
…
I may be crazy,
But this is forever true.

It was never like this,
It was my fault.
I had defeated my own nightmare no less,
But my actions caused it to bless.
A cage in a basement I made,
It turned that to its charade.

Now I shall find something to confront,
It shall never leave my front.
An existence that shouldn’t exist.
I shall annihilate that, fist with fist.

An old shadow, with yellow flaming eyes.
I looked in past at time, I try,
Four preceding angelic numbers of time,
Guided times hand to defeat;
It was something, my greatest feat.
The nightmare that I caged.

𝘐 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘰𝘭𝘥
𝘵𝘰 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵.

For I shall now figure this cursed time,
Else I will meet an inevitable demise.