The Suitcase is Heavier Now

I wake in the dark,

mouth thick with last night’s ruin,

lungs tar-coiled, tongue drowned in copper ghosts.

Whiskey-rancid breath blooms in the air,

but the books—they whisper anyway.

I don’t know when it started.

The first time my hands shook open a spine

and the words bled from the paper,

crawled up my arms, slithered beneath my ribs.

The first time I read someone back to life.

They told me I was just another drunk,

pickled in regret and rustwater sorrow,

but I know better.

The dead still want things.

Each book a body.

Each name a nail.

Each syllable an invitation.

I breathe them back,

ink-coiled specters, spine-cracked revenants,

watch their paper-thin fingers tremble

as they crawl from between the pages.

They come back with dust in their mouths,

moth-chewed voices, and eyes full of something

that should have stayed buried.

But they don’t thank me.

None of them do.

They only wait

and watch

and want.

I drink to quiet them,

drown their murmurs in bourbon-shattered stillness,

but the suitcase is heavier now.

Every night, more books, more names,

more hands reaching from the margins.

They climb inside my head,

fingertips pressed to the soft parts of my memory,

rewriting things I once forgot.

Tonight, I swear I won’t read again.

I won’t open the pages.

I won’t say the words.

I won’t wake the dead.

But my hands already know the weight of resurrection.

And the whiskey is running low.