They found me wrapped in the damp velvet of a collapsing sky, where the stars are only static and the sun is a bruised violet.  They brought me here, to the house of no reflection, the house built from industrial rust and dried tears.  Strangers, who smelled like wet lies and the vacuum of an empty room, they unraveled my name and replaced my eyes with pure black beads.  They fed me from the porcelain memory and the tin can of dread, whispering beautiful lies in the language of the machine, the language I had to learn to speak to survive the siege.

It is a constant, quiet siege here, my love.  They polished my smile to hide the engine grinding in my throat, asking which piece of my shadow I traded for a handful of copper coins to keep the boundary line, the perimeter of the ghost.  A stranger I was raised, a blank tape in a haunted recorder, the air here a low-frequency dirge, the hum of hostility, the dust of this territory demanding its daily ration of blood.

The strangers claim they are my family, but I cannot see their faces: only the glitch in the circuitry where the memory of them should be.  They are made of wires and water, of velvet and rust, and I am the missing degree, the hole in the counting book.  So I wait for the trumpet, for the tomorrow that will demand my ration, a lonely tower, a fractured piece of future ruins, writing these words in the invisible greaves of the soul while the carousel of time spins on, and there’s nowhere left to go.

The bugle sounds in the marrow of the bone, a frequencies-of-war transmission playing since the womb.  To wear the skin of a man is to inherit a trenches-mind, strapping on invisible greaves before the coffee goes cold, polishing the brass of a smile to hide the siege engine grinding behind the teeth.

There is no armistice in the mirror.  Every morning, the reflection demands a casualty count, asking which piece of the soul was bartered away to hold the perimeter, to keep the roof from caving in, to keep the wolves from the nursery door.  The world is an arena of concrete and cold calculations, where weakness is a scent that brings the vultures circling low, and vulnerability is a luxury traded for a handful of copper coins.

We are walking arsenals of quiet desperation, carrying the shrapnel of old expectations in our knees, moving through the supermarket aisles like infantry under night-vision sky.  You must be the pillar, says the broadcast, you must be the iron rod, says the ledger, even when the foundation is nothing but shifting sand and industrial dust.

The battlefields are silent but total.  The boardroom, the highway, the heavy silence of the kitchen at midnight, where the map is unrolled and the territory is shrinking.  No flags are waved for this campaign, no medals pinned to the chest of the tired commuter.  Only a permanent fatigue, a low-frequency hum of hostility, and grim, mechanical certainty that tomorrow, the trumpet will blow again, and the dust will demand its daily ration of blood.