The Glass Eye's Cycle

I. The Man on the 8:15

The clock is not a clock,

but a ticking heart.

The shadow is not a shadow,

but a passenger on the next train,

and every face in the car is a mask

that peels back to an older, truer face

of someone you never knew.

You are not late. You are the destination.

The conductor punches your ticket.

No one is watching. Everyone is watching.

II. The Scarecrow's Lesson

The field has no God,

only a logic of rust and rain.

The crows, black riders on the wind,

are the only priests,

and their scripture is a single seed

that falls on rock and does not sprout.

The sun is a brass coin.

The scarecrow, an effigy of nothing,

has learned the truest prayer:

to stand still and be emptied of purpose.

III. The Gilt Decoy

The dust is a memory of skin.

The music is a memory of a waltz.

The mirror shows only what you believe is there:

a beautiful decay.

When the sun leaks through the broken pane,

it illuminates not the living,

but the hollow space where they once were.

A red stain on the floorboards

is the only proof of a passion

that was only a hunger.

IV. The Quiet Parade

Every window in this town

is a closed eye.

Every street is a vein of quiet blood,

and in each dark, silent house

a grotesque is polishing their single,

perfect, beautiful grief.

We do not speak,

we do not touch,

but we walk together.

A parade of perfect, broken things,

shining in the dark,

waiting to be seen by the wrong person.

The cycle continues.

The Empty Chair

The dust motes dance in a dead sunbeam,

and a ghost of a scent clings to the air.

A room is an open wound where something once lived,

now a waiting place for a knock that won’t come.

Each shadow is a photograph of a shape that vanished,

and the empty chair by the window is the truest

and most terrible portrait.

It whispers the last, perfect secret:

some endings are just a new kind of waiting.

The Coin in the Well

He tossed a penny for a new life,

a wish for a wish, a lie for a lie.

The sound of it falling was small and pure,

like a promise you never meant to keep.

Years later, the well ran dry.

He found his face reflected in the mud,

and nestled in the exact center of his forehead

was the coin, bright and sharp.

The cost of your future is always paid

by the things you thought you’d forgotten.

The Final Map

We charted a cosmos in a drop of blood.

We called it "home." We called it "me."

But the map has an edge, a final fold,

where the green grass turns to black nothing.

You stand on the precipice, holding a hand

that is not there, looking at a reflection

that has no face. The choice is a simple one:

to be a multitude, or to be the single star

that shines, alone, in the endless dark.

The Unseen Witness

The streetlights are all silent, judging eyes.

The window in the house across the way,

a pupil staring back into the dark.

Your shoes scrape a rhythm of a guilty thing,

and the rustle of a leaf is a whispered name.

You are the one they’ve chosen.

The crime is not the one you didn’t do,

but the one they need you to have done,

and every ordinary thing around you

is a perfect, terrible conspirator.

A Garden of Rust

The lilies bloom in a shade of old blood.

The iron gates are a tangled memory of vines.

She comes at dusk, a scent of rain and sepulcher,

her kiss a faint echo of a hunger you felt once,

before the world was full of stone and sorrow.

The garden offers no comfort, only a question:

Do you mourn the beautiful girl,

or the beautiful way she became a ghost?

The Archivist

The filing cabinet breathes.

The pages whisper a final, fading sound.

Every tale of a lost soul,

of a fool who made a choice,

is filed away in a box marked "Human."

The librarian adjusts his spectacles,

and smiles the tired smile of one

who knows the last sentence to every story.

Here, there are no happy endings,

only the closing of a file

and the promise of another one tomorrow.