In the pallid hour where mirrors forget their oaths,
a visage rises—shorn of shadow’s crown,
scalp a moon scraped clean by silent scythes,
skin bleached to the color of unspoken prayers.
Behold the alabaster effigy,
a porcelain ghoul exhumed from the marrow of night,
eyes twin garnets drowned in milk of oblivion,
lids half-drawn like curtains on a theater of bone.
The mouth—O crimson sigil slashed across the void—
a wound that sings in vermilion,
lips lacquered in the blood of extinct roses,
parted just enough to exhale the perfume of tombs.
Beneath the sternum, a lattice of white threads
weaves a shroud that was once a shirt,
now sepulcher linen stitched by spectral hands,
each diamond a grave for forgotten warmth.
This is no mortal countenance,
but the eidolon of a soul flayed by starlight,
a bald seraph dipped in the ash of burnt halos,
red mouth the only ember left in the cathedral of flesh.
Gaze longer, pilgrim of the screen,
and you shall hear the silence scream in carmine,
feel the cold of marble seep through the glass,
until your own reflection begins to pale,
to shave its shadows,
to paint its terror in the same obscene red.
For this image is a mirror turned inside out—
a prophecy in negative space,
where the living become ghosts
and the ghosts, by a single stroke of lipstick,
remember how to hunger.
a visage rises—shorn of shadow’s crown,
scalp a moon scraped clean by silent scythes,
skin bleached to the color of unspoken prayers.
Behold the alabaster effigy,
a porcelain ghoul exhumed from the marrow of night,
eyes twin garnets drowned in milk of oblivion,
lids half-drawn like curtains on a theater of bone.
The mouth—O crimson sigil slashed across the void—
a wound that sings in vermilion,
lips lacquered in the blood of extinct roses,
parted just enough to exhale the perfume of tombs.
Beneath the sternum, a lattice of white threads
weaves a shroud that was once a shirt,
now sepulcher linen stitched by spectral hands,
each diamond a grave for forgotten warmth.
This is no mortal countenance,
but the eidolon of a soul flayed by starlight,
a bald seraph dipped in the ash of burnt halos,
red mouth the only ember left in the cathedral of flesh.
Gaze longer, pilgrim of the screen,
and you shall hear the silence scream in carmine,
feel the cold of marble seep through the glass,
until your own reflection begins to pale,
to shave its shadows,
to paint its terror in the same obscene red.
For this image is a mirror turned inside out—
a prophecy in negative space,
where the living become ghosts
and the ghosts, by a single stroke of lipstick,
remember how to hunger.
The Sunday Circle