the invoice for my handcuffs

Do not mistake the stain for the skin.

I have seen the predator’s mouth,

a cavern of endless "more,"

an appetite that calls itself a right.

But we, who carry the mark of what we loathe,

we know a different hunger.

We practice the art of the kamikaze dove.

It is a holy, terrifying starvation—

a refusal to be the fuel for their fires,

a decision to let the belly go hollow

rather than host the parasite.

To starve the impression is not to die,

but to deny the ghost its meat.

It is the protest of the small, the soft,

the ones who would rather collapse into light

than be the bridge where evil walks across.

We are not what was pressed into us.

We are the space that remains

when we refuse to be eaten.

>>>>><<<<<

It clings, a dark salt,

stinging the places where I am soft.

You—who revel in the able,

whose mouth is a wide, ungraced cavern—

you eat the sun and the orchard

and call it hunger.

But I am the kamikaze dove.

I have learned the sharp beauty

of an absent heart.

I would rather be a ghost of wind

than a feast for your shadow.

See how I pull my soul

thin as a thread of silk?

I am starving the stain

until there is nothing left

for your teeth to find.

I fall toward the earth,

a white arrow of No.

>>>>>><<<<<<

The air has grown thin with the weight of your smallness. I have watched you, a frantic collector of shadows, trying to fill the hollow centers of your own lack with the substance of my time. You come with your ridiculous requests, those gaudy, paper-thin emergencies that you expect me to gild with my own blood.

There is a brutal contempt in the way you reach for me—as if I were a shelf, a glass, a mirror for your own unformed face.

I am no longer a landscape you can map with your petty demands. I have begun to practice a delicate, internal starvation. I am withholding the honey. I am drawing the curtains across the rooms of my curiosity where you once sat, uninvited and ungrateful.

I have realized that my time is the only currency that cannot be minted again. To give it to your trivialities is a form of spiritual suicide I no longer wish to commit. I am the dove, of redemption, diving away from the wreckage of your expectations.

I do not hate you; hate is a form of attention, and I have no more to spare. I simply find that you have become a noise I no longer hear, a shape I no longer see. I am folding my life away from your reach, into a space where only the essential remains.

I will not be the theater for your exhaustion.

>>>>>><<<<<<

The Apothecary’s Manacles

They did not use the heavy iron of the colonies.

They used the language of the laboratory,

the soft clicking of the syringe,

the white coat that justifies the blow.

First, they gave you the gift of stillness:

a chemical rope tied around the synapses,

a gag made of molecules.

They called this "stabilizing the patient."

(They always use the passive voice

to hide the hand that holds the needle).

Then came the architecture of the cage.

Four walls that do not move,

a clock that has been murdered,

and the "brutal contempt" of the orderly

who looks at you and sees

only a biological error to be corrected.

And the final cruelty,

the crowning achievement of the "able":

the Invoice.

A piece of paper demanding payment

for the theft of your Tuesday,

for the bruise on your arm,

for the jail cell where they threw your protest.

They want you to pay for the salt

they rubbed into the wound.

They want you to fund the machine

that tried to eat your light.

But the memory is a kamikaze dove.

It flies back into the clean, sterile rooms.

It starves itself of their definitions.

It refuses to be the "Healthcare" they sold.

In the end, you are the one who remains.

They are only the bill

that the wind will eventually tear.