I have walked inside myself
and found corridors
that twist without end,
where echoes do not die,
they multiply.
The eyes I carry
belong to every gaze that shaped me;
stumbling through this fragile world,
they brush against half-formed faces,
then spiral inward,
toward what I have lost
and toward the shadows
I thought were buried.
Whatever love lingers
shivers in the corners,
a flicker too small to hold.
Something stirs along the spine of memory,
a shadow that never sleeps,
stalking my steps
through hallways that belong to no one.
I keep walking.
I carry a fractured light
inside my chest,
its tremor brushing against walls
that are cold, cracked, and callous.
The echoes thin as I walk,
leaving only the ghost of their noise;
silence swollen with what it swallowed,
waiting for the pause between heartbeats
to remind me of what I can never name.
I press my palm to the wall.
It resists.
I hear blood through veins
that are neither mine nor another’s,
furious with a hunger that wants
everything and nothing.
Sometimes I whisper to the dark,
and the dark whispers back:
that all the chambers
I have claimed for myself
are already empty.
Yet I have kissed this hollow,
tasted the salt of my own anger,
and found it sweeter than any lips I ever held-
even in passing, even in absence.
I know this void will hold me without shame
long after the rest of the world forgets me.
In its depths, the self reveals itself:
the soul is a twisting maze,
warping memories in its winding ways;
sharp, cold, dripping with what I wanted
and what I could not have.
I inhale its void anyway,
letting it fill my lungs
so that when I exhale,
there is only the smoke—
the faint warmth I once refused
to let the world touch.
My passages: threadbare,
trodden, forever alone.
What could compare
to the heartbeat of a self
that has learned to survive
within its own labyrinth?
Listen: it still beats.