Sniffing the wildwood flower that blooms in the inkwell of my mind, where once there were woods. Now insanity vines deeper than my tattoo of grief—I carve the veins in Mama’s wrists, blue as the bruises left by her last lover. The one who didn’t stay long enough to see her wither. Not as she was at the end, but younger, grinning with a cigarette dangling from her chipped front tooth. The smoke curls up past my fingers, th...

I bring you this: a bouquet of shadows beneath my ink. They are not flowers, but the lingering shapes of things that departed before they were ever truly gone. Les longs adieux. The slow, agonizing drain of the tide, not the crash of the wave. You told me the city was just a collection of bones, but I know it is a city of ghosts, a sprawling, sun-drenched, desolate, and beautiful nightmare of eucalyptus and broken glass....

The bard’s fingers hover over the ledger, ink pooling beneath the quill’s nib at the end of the day, when cognac makes thoughts grow deeper than the waters where the flamingos unfurl their wings, touching the rhythm we call life between syllable and shadows in the body… we call insomnia, what others might call ghosts or insanity—hearing whispers: “Polly, want a cracker.” Tallying his mañana, he scrawled debits between fin...

Aye, the nib doth part the flesh of the page, slow as a thief in a sepulchre’s shade— not with haste, nay, nor with the clatter of some dullard’s hammer, but with the whisper of a blade parting silk. Here, in this parlour of shadows, where the candle gutters like a dying saint, I spill not ink but the slow ichor of thought, black as a widow’s lace, thick as confession unfurled in the hush of the confessional. The parchmen...

With each drop of ink fall, fading to indigo, twilight’s measured rhythm unfurling. On the night into a world of its own, feeling each drop of oxygen. Soft as the blooming fog, a secret, with the dying light, memoirs of the quill. Its spine cracks beneath the weight, of every word unsaid, forged and forgotten. Sheets curl away like fists unclenching, whispering stories to the damp air. The scent of old paper, warm whiskey...

The steam uncoils like a whispered lie, a ghost in the curl of a tea-leaf, —black as a raven’s sigh, but something lingers, steeped too hot. Not leaves, but darkness, swirling slow, a stain that clings to porcelain bone, it pours like ink, but thicker still— drink deep, and taste what isn’t there. The throat remembers, it was never just tea, it was crumpets for you and me, and the shadow that does not dissolve, —oh, Sweet...

Tuesday: 4 PM… once upon my midnight dreary as I sat hibernating with a bottle of Jose Cuervo, after tripping over my shadow in a nocturnal dance desecrating my creeping insomnia. An acolyte of the dark academia, until the final page is full, or the darkness finally scribbles out my name, with a symphony whispering to the daffodils.

In the dusk’s heavy breath, where the light falters, shadows convene—a murmuration of silhouettes stitching the sky into something alive and wrong. A fever-dream of midnight wings settles over the rooftops, too many bodies moving as one, not a flock, a Covid of crows descending like a shroud, an uninvited specter. Their blackened forms, a soft susurrous stirring the wind, a mournful whisper that rustles through the barren...

From the dust in the hand of God With a whisper in a storm In the presence of a quiet hum Watching a chicken cross the road Then creating Adam With a long odyssey ahead Breathing life into the egg

Her fingers twitched against the marble counter in the kitchen. Jeanette, a 47-year-old raptured endowed member of the neighborhood's debauched coven of decadent insomniacs, and bowling widows. Stirring the fondue, calling the kettle black as the cheese bubbled over her makeshift altar (the oven). She was speaking to someone—or something—in the pantry, a can of mushroom soup—perhaps, the autographed picture of Wayne Newto...

The story you are about to hear is true. This is the city. Charlotte Web, Louisiana. The Phantom wasn’t a man who solved cases; he was a man who closed chapters that polite society pretended had already ended in the boneyards. You wanted a problem to go away, you called on death. He operated out of an office that smelled of stale cigarettes, and beefaroni. His suits were a little too sharp, his fedora a little too low, hi...

Hear me, brethren of the Shadow, you consecrated few, do not lament the light that shrank to cinder dust, in the eternal fault, the failure calcified. Who taste the bitter loam where broken faiths accrue. For we are pledged to higher architecture, built on trust. We work where mercy ends and memory has died. We do not fashion keystones for some blessed spire, scraping the shales of sorrow, purged of name and shame. Our qu...

No leaves to rustle, no birds to nest of tree skeletons with brittle cones a haunting grace waiting the thaw with a promise green, never be as winds sigh through cages of bones a dark beauty of their final rest with hollowed music lonely and cold No leaves to rustle, no birds to nest

…the rain came down, a steady soft sound, on the roof. Running like a river, down the window pane. And so it went, lost in the flow, quiet moments, of simplicity.

In the dim lit corners of my mind, shadows coil like serpents, a pulse, a beckoning, each flicker of the candle, drawing me deeper into the night. Tracing the outlines of your face, etching your name on my skin, a tattoo of longing, each letter a thorn, each breath a shiver, cold as the grave. In this room, walls pulse with whispers, air thick with your scent—a bitter-sweetness, like rain on rusted metal, and I drown in i...