The Weight of Time

I see too much.

Not through these shattered neon lenses,

not through the cracked carnival of color

that bends the world into lies—

but through the spaces between.

The fractures in my hands tell stories

I’d rather forget.

The cold gnaws at my joints,

whispering names I buried decades ago.

The world hums in electric shades,

but I know what lurks in the dim corners

where the colors don’t reach.

They say time softens the past,

but time is a liar.

It doesn’t heal.

It scrawls over old wounds in screaming ink,

layer upon layer

until the weight crushes your breath.

I sit in the glow of something artificial,

a man draped in blues and violence,

a shadow stitched to skin.

Behind my eyes, ghosts press against glass,

their breath fogging the edges of memory.

I raise a trembling hand,

brush the coarse ruin of my own face,

and I wonder—

when did I become the ghost?