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.

The screen is dripping black bile into the carpet, and the frequency smells like rotting copper. They sat in the rows, their eyes wide like saucers, drinking the blue light, swallowing the soft, warm hum until the tissue of the frontal lobe began to liquefy.
It wasn’t a biological contagion—no cough, no fever— just a quiet, systemic erasure of the baseline. A virus of the porous mind, an infection of the hollow spaces where common sense used to rattle around like a loose marble. Now, they walk the streets with their jaws slightly slack, repeating the phrases the box gave them at 6:00 PM, unable to tell the difference between the sun and an electric bulb, unable to realize their hands are bleeding when they grip the razor wire.
Fifty percent. A perfect, clean division. The ledger of the world is split right down the center. The damage is done, the tracks are rusted over, the synapses burned out leaving only a permanent, porcelain glaze over the pupils. They cannot be reasoned with; you cannot argue with an empty room.
And the architects in the velvet coats are standing over the map, their silver dividers measuring the only two options left on the table: The first is the great concrete grid, the silent reeducation hives, where the walls are painted a uniform gray and the loudspeakers play white noise for forty years until the ghosts are sufficiently flattened. The second is simpler, more industrial, more absolute. A long, slow march down the shale cliffs, guiding the unthinking, cooperative herds by the millions straight into the cold, forgiving mouth of the gray Atlantic, where the salt might finally wash the static from their bones.

The drawers slide open with the sound of a dry cough,
Revealing the archaeology of a Sunday afternoon.
Here is the collection of silver spoons that never tasted anything but dust,
And a stack of postcards from cities that have since changed their names.
The air in this room is stagnant, a thick broth of expired dreams,
And the smell of mothballs guarding empty suits.

I am sifting through the sediment of a nervous life.
A keychain from a summer fair,
A spectacles case line with frayed velvet,
A map with a circle drawn around a house that was torn down in 1994.
He spent sixty years worrying about the alignment of the stars,
Counting his pulse in the dark,
Building a fortress out of receipts and polite conversation.

But the clock on the mantle has already forgotten his shadow.
The wallpaper doesn’t miss his leaning weight.
There is a profound, echoing silence in the kitchen
Where he once thought his opinions held the gravity of planets.

Outside, the crows are busy with the business of being crows.
The traffic flow is rhythmic, indifferent, a river of cold neon.
In ten minutes, the memory of his scent will be scrubbed away by a pine-scented breeze.
In twenty, his chair will be a ghost-shape in a thrift store window.
The universe is a vast, mechanical yawn,
And we are the lint trapped in the gears for a flickering second
Before being puffed into the gray static of the void.

All that architecture of the ego,
The delicate lace of ‘who I am’ and ‘what I’ve done,’
Just a pile of damp cardboard in a rain-slicked alleyway.
The ink on the page is already fading into the color of a bruise,
Leaving nothing by the quiet, mocking whistle of the wind.
Through a keyhole that no longer belongs to anyone.

The sky is the color of a bruised iris,
A velvet static where the crows collide.
I am an architect of iron silhouettes,
Wading through the marrow of the morning tide.

They told me the soil was for planting,
But it only accepts the shape of a blade.
Every breath is a tactical maneuver,
In this clockwork labyrinth we’ve made.

My tongue is a rusted bayonet,
Sharpened on the stones of old regrets.
We speak in hollow-point whispers,
Casting shadows like fishing nets.

The infantry of days marches in silence,
A steady rhythm of leather on bone.
We are the kings of a crumbling cellar,
Defending a fractured, invisible throne.

The ink is bitter, the ink is cold,
A dark artillery for the stories untold.
We fire our verses into the gray,
To keep the ghosts of the light at bay.

For the war is not found in the thunder,
But in the quiet collapse of the heart.
And we are the soldiers of the lexicon,
Tearing the beautiful silence apart.

N.P.: “Tuvan” – EINKI

Spiegel schaut mich an,
Wer ist dieser alte Mann?
Ach, das bin ja ich.

N.P.: “Teufel” – Schwarzer Engel

No Number Seven

The floorboards are humming a digital hiss,
A gap in the sequence, a glitch in the bliss.
I’m stacking the vertebrae, pearly and white,
But one of the shadows took flight in the night.

One is a lonely, a thimble of lead,
Two is the whisperer under the bed.
Three is the triangle, sharp as a pin,
Four is the box where the silence lives in.

Five is the finger that points at the moon,
Six is the silver that’s tarnished too soon.
And then— The air turns to static, the gears start to grind,
A hole in the tapestry, deep in the mind.

There’s a ghost in the lattice, a missing degree,
A lock with no tumbler, a salt-crusted key.
I reach for the handle, I reach for the stair,
But the step that comes after is simply not there.

So I leap to the Eight, where the spiders are blue,
Counting the stitches of what’s left of you.
Nine is the velvet, Ten is the rust,
The world is a ledger of industrial dust.

But that hollow between them, that vacuum of space,
Is the shape of a memory, the curve of a face.
The universe blinked and the number fell through,
Now there’s six of the many, and eight of the few.

N.P.: “Tweeba – Fluke Remix” – sLEdger

Dream #3326 – The Archivist at the End of the Garden

I found the Archivist again tonight,
kneeling in the frostbitten garden,
feeding passwords to the snails.
He said the moon was misfiled,
that someone had switched its label
with a jar of counterfeit memories
left humming on the back shelf
of the sky.

He asked if I remembered the Agreement.
I told him I’d misplaced the paperwork
somewhere between the dream
with the burning carousel
and the morning I woke up
with someone else’s heartbeat
ticking in my throat.

He nodded –
as if this were the most predictable
of catastrophes –
and handed me a cracked teacup
full of static.
“Drink,” he whispered,
“before the clocks notice you’re awake.”

So I drank.
And the garden folded inward
like a paper fortune-teller,
and all the snails began reciting
the names  of people
I haven’t become yet.

The Archivist smiled,
wiped the moonlight from his hands,
and told me gently
that the world would end
three times tonight,
but only one version
would remember to write it down.

N.P.: “Early To Bed” – Bjorn Berge