SHUT YOUR MOUTH!!!

Listen to me.

Quieten your laughter, and you may hear my screams ferment beneath your mirth, souring the sweetness of your joy. You will hear my voice echo in the calabash of a starless night, that ancient gourd where gods once whispered prophecies to priests now drowned in dust. My voice poisons the soul of all sounds. It curdles lullabies. It haunts the hymnals. It strangles silence.

The walls of this wretched earth, built with the bricks of broken promises and plastered over with the blood of believers, will tremble. All the nocturnal creatures will go to bed for I am the only thing that deserves a sleepless night. The moon turns its face from me. Even insomnia flinches at my name.

My eyes contain no rest nor dreams. Only flickers of memories half-devoured by time. My bones are hollow and heavy with the weight of unwept grief. They bow beneath me like the spine of an old cathedral, proud and crumbling. My thoughts are a noose of questions tightening with each futile answer. I scream for the sheer horror of hearing nothing scream back. I scream to the world, but the world wears cotton in its ears and gold in its eyes. My voice travels through deaf ears and returns to me like a prodigal child, carrying the scent of foreign neglect. It kneels at my feet. I offer it nothing except more of myself.

And when I cry, my tears reach my cheeks and they retreat. They witness the pain of living, the mockery of motion, and rush back into my open eyes like traitors afraid of the war outside. My vision is blurred by the shame of surviving.

Shut up. And you will hear me. In the garden of ghosts, where I pluck funeral flowers for my own death that never comes. Petal by petal, I braid a wreath for my forehead, for I am both the mourner and the corpse, the preacher and the condemned. The casket consoles me. It understands. It does not ask questions. The carpenter’s wood remembers my name better than my own family. On its lid, it carves: Hic Jacet: Palmwyndrinkard. The literary tarantula. The boy who points to a road and the road bends The scientist in the laboratory of love, language, and literature

I was born and I made a sorry work of living. A shoddy patchwork of days sewn together with dread. I tried to laugh, and each time, sand fell from my mouth. Grainy, barren, the very matter of graves. And they mocked me for it. They said I spoke like someone already buried. They weren’t wrong.

Now, I wait for the verdict of vultures. Let them land on my roof and cast their judgment with beaks and claws. Let their tongues, thick with rot, strip my bones of flesh and dignity. Let my soul wander, unsupervised, until it is captured, branded, and sold in a slave ship of sorrow and to eternal overthinking. A mind that won’t just shut up. In the middle of the ocean, beneath the swimming planks, beneath the rituals of tides and drowned prayers, all living things will hush. Not because they understand. But because they too have run out of answers.