In the crypt of unstruck hours, where time’s vertebrae
crack like ice beneath a moon that never learned to rise,
a body rehearses its own erasure—
slow, deliberate, the way a glacier forgets the mountain.
Flesh, once a lantern, dims to tallow;
the wick of pulse gutters in a wind no lung can name.
Capillaries, once rivers, narrow to capillaries of dust,
carrying silted memories to a heart that hoards them
like a miser clutching coins no mint will honor.
Beneath the sternum’s vault, a cathedral of small bones
collapses inward, rib by rib, a rosary of calcium
unstrung by the patient fingers of entropy.
Each vertebra sighs, a hinge ungreased by blood,
and the spine, that proud ladder to the skull,
bows at last to the weight of its own forgetting.
The liver, swollen with the wine of yesterday,
leaks its amber prophecies into the peritoneal dark;
the spleen, a bruised fruit, splits and spills
its pulp of petty angers, souring the cavity.
Kidneys, twin sieves, strain the final silt of salt,
then clog, thenhed, surrender to the quiet tyranny of stone.
Intestines, those serpentine archives,
unravel their scrolls of half-digested days—
a breadcrumb, a vow, a lover’s name—
all fermenting into the same gray hush.
The stomach, a deflated bellows,
collapses on the ember of its last hunger,
smoke curling upward through the esophagus
like a question no throat will ever ask again.
Lungs, those bellows of bellows,
fold their pleated wings;
alveoli, once cathedrals of exchange,
fill with the dust of unvoiced psalms.
The diaphragm, a drum no hand will strike,
relaxes into the slack of eternal rest,
and the chest cavity becomes a cavern
where echoes go to die.
The brain, that jeweled tyrant,
short-circuits in its bath of brine:
synapses spark like dying stars,
neurons misfire across the darkening cortex—
a memory of rain, a fragment of song,
the smell of bread in a kitchen that no longer exists.
The hippocampus, archivist of the self,
loses its shelves; volumes tumble, pages scatter,
until the story of “I” is a pile of ash
no wind will bother to disturb.
Eyes, those traitors to the visible,
cloud like ponds in winter;
the retina, a screen unplugged,
projects its final image:
a silhouette against a door that opens onto nothing.
Pupils dilate to drink the dark,
then fix, two black coins pressed
onto the lids of a ferryman who never comes.
The tongue, thick with the grammar of farewell,
swells, forgets its syllables;
saliva dries to salt, a desert in the mouth.
Teeth, once gates, stand ajar in a jaw
that will never bite again.
The voice, a bird that nested in the throat,
takes flight and leaves no feather.
Skin, the last frontier,
loosens its contract with the world:
freckles fade like stars at dawn,
scars smooth into anonymity,
pores close their small mouths.
It slackens, pools, becomes a map
of a country no one will invade.
Hair, once a banner,
falls in strands like rain from a gutter;
the scalp, a field after harvest,
yields its last pale stalks.
Nails, those tiny moons,
grow opaque, then stop,
frozen in their lunula of becoming.
Blood, the red river,
slows to a trickle, then a seep,
then a stain that darkens to rust.
It thickens, clots, forgets its mission,
pools in the dependent curves
like ink in a forgotten well.
Bones, the final architecture,
begin their long conversation with gravity:
marrow dries to chalk,
calcium leaches into the sheet,
the skeleton rehearses its collapse
into the geometry of dust.
The name, that fragile sigil,
unravels letter by letter:
the “I” first, then the rest,
until the signature is a smudge
no clerk will ever read.
Outside, the world continues its indifferent waltz—
a sparrow lands, a leaf detaches,
a cloud forgets its shape.
Inside, the body is a city
abandoned by its citizens:
streets of veins, plazas of organs,
all echoing with the same small sound—
the hush of something learning how to end.
And deeper still, in the marrow’s marrow,
a seed of silence splits:
not pain, not peace,
but the pure, unfiltered absence
that precedes even the idea of light.
It spreads, a tide with no moon,
erasing footprints, shorelines,
the very concept of water.
The soul—if soul there was—
slips its tether like a boat
from a dock that never was.
It does not rise, does not fall;
it simply ceases to be a place
where anything could happen.
What remains is not corpse, not memory,
but a shape the air forgets to hold:
a negative space, a hole in the shape of a life,
through which the wind passes
without learning a single secret.
And in that passing,
the universe inhales—
not with sorrow, not with triumph,
but with the vast, indifferent patience
of something that has swallowed
a billion billion names
and still hungers for the next.
crack like ice beneath a moon that never learned to rise,
a body rehearses its own erasure—
slow, deliberate, the way a glacier forgets the mountain.
Flesh, once a lantern, dims to tallow;
the wick of pulse gutters in a wind no lung can name.
Capillaries, once rivers, narrow to capillaries of dust,
carrying silted memories to a heart that hoards them
like a miser clutching coins no mint will honor.
Beneath the sternum’s vault, a cathedral of small bones
collapses inward, rib by rib, a rosary of calcium
unstrung by the patient fingers of entropy.
Each vertebra sighs, a hinge ungreased by blood,
and the spine, that proud ladder to the skull,
bows at last to the weight of its own forgetting.
The liver, swollen with the wine of yesterday,
leaks its amber prophecies into the peritoneal dark;
the spleen, a bruised fruit, splits and spills
its pulp of petty angers, souring the cavity.
Kidneys, twin sieves, strain the final silt of salt,
then clog, thenhed, surrender to the quiet tyranny of stone.
Intestines, those serpentine archives,
unravel their scrolls of half-digested days—
a breadcrumb, a vow, a lover’s name—
all fermenting into the same gray hush.
The stomach, a deflated bellows,
collapses on the ember of its last hunger,
smoke curling upward through the esophagus
like a question no throat will ever ask again.
Lungs, those bellows of bellows,
fold their pleated wings;
alveoli, once cathedrals of exchange,
fill with the dust of unvoiced psalms.
The diaphragm, a drum no hand will strike,
relaxes into the slack of eternal rest,
and the chest cavity becomes a cavern
where echoes go to die.
The brain, that jeweled tyrant,
short-circuits in its bath of brine:
synapses spark like dying stars,
neurons misfire across the darkening cortex—
a memory of rain, a fragment of song,
the smell of bread in a kitchen that no longer exists.
The hippocampus, archivist of the self,
loses its shelves; volumes tumble, pages scatter,
until the story of “I” is a pile of ash
no wind will bother to disturb.
Eyes, those traitors to the visible,
cloud like ponds in winter;
the retina, a screen unplugged,
projects its final image:
a silhouette against a door that opens onto nothing.
Pupils dilate to drink the dark,
then fix, two black coins pressed
onto the lids of a ferryman who never comes.
The tongue, thick with the grammar of farewell,
swells, forgets its syllables;
saliva dries to salt, a desert in the mouth.
Teeth, once gates, stand ajar in a jaw
that will never bite again.
The voice, a bird that nested in the throat,
takes flight and leaves no feather.
Skin, the last frontier,
loosens its contract with the world:
freckles fade like stars at dawn,
scars smooth into anonymity,
pores close their small mouths.
It slackens, pools, becomes a map
of a country no one will invade.
Hair, once a banner,
falls in strands like rain from a gutter;
the scalp, a field after harvest,
yields its last pale stalks.
Nails, those tiny moons,
grow opaque, then stop,
frozen in their lunula of becoming.
Blood, the red river,
slows to a trickle, then a seep,
then a stain that darkens to rust.
It thickens, clots, forgets its mission,
pools in the dependent curves
like ink in a forgotten well.
Bones, the final architecture,
begin their long conversation with gravity:
marrow dries to chalk,
calcium leaches into the sheet,
the skeleton rehearses its collapse
into the geometry of dust.
The name, that fragile sigil,
unravels letter by letter:
the “I” first, then the rest,
until the signature is a smudge
no clerk will ever read.
Outside, the world continues its indifferent waltz—
a sparrow lands, a leaf detaches,
a cloud forgets its shape.
Inside, the body is a city
abandoned by its citizens:
streets of veins, plazas of organs,
all echoing with the same small sound—
the hush of something learning how to end.
And deeper still, in the marrow’s marrow,
a seed of silence splits:
not pain, not peace,
but the pure, unfiltered absence
that precedes even the idea of light.
It spreads, a tide with no moon,
erasing footprints, shorelines,
the very concept of water.
The soul—if soul there was—
slips its tether like a boat
from a dock that never was.
It does not rise, does not fall;
it simply ceases to be a place
where anything could happen.
What remains is not corpse, not memory,
but a shape the air forgets to hold:
a negative space, a hole in the shape of a life,
through which the wind passes
without learning a single secret.
And in that passing,
the universe inhales—
not with sorrow, not with triumph,
but with the vast, indifferent patience
of something that has swallowed
a billion billion names
and still hungers for the next.
Topic Live
