Tremble Bridge

(from the Ethertown cycle)

There is a bridge that quivers in the mist,
A span of rust and spectral filament;
Its timbers hum with names that don’t exist,
Its arches bend where all directions went.

I crossed it once in fever’s lucid glow,
When dream and dose had folded into one;
Beneath, a current older than we know
Sang static hymns in tongues of unbegun.

Each step became a thousand, all at once,
A reel of futures spooled through phantom eyes;
I saw the ghost towns learning how to dance,
I heard the silence teaching how to rise.

And when I woke, the taste of ozone stayed —
A toll from worlds the bridge alone had made.

Poem II: Gate of Static

A curtain parts, but woven out of snow,
The television’s endless, ghostly breath;
Within the flicker other cities glow,
And half-formed faces whisper deathless death.

One syllable will grant you passage through,
A code of broken syllogism’s hum;
But fail, and endless reruns capture you,
Condemned to watch what never was begun.

The Gate is static, yet it breathes and bends;
A buzzing threshold, bright and yet decayed.
All journeys into Ethertown must end
By passing through the noise that worlds have made.

Step slow, for every shadow that you bring
Becomes a character in loops that sing.

III. Polytechnic Lights

The towers rise where textbooks rot in rain,
Each lecture hall a throat of iron flame;
Professors carved from phosphor chant in vain,
Their syllabi erase the speaker’s name.

Corridors of equations twist like vines,
Theorems hum in chalk that burns the hand;
A prism splits forgotten archetypes,
Degrees conferred on ghosts who cannot stand.

The windows glow with phosphorescent dread,
A campus made of scaffolds, not of stone;
Its quads are paved with footnotes never read,
Its libraries are shelves of dial tones.

To walk the Lights is to enroll in dreams—
A student of the unreal and unseen.

IV. Archive of Ashes

A library adrift in ember haze,
Its shelves are ribcages of shattered spines;
The air is ink that smolders as it sways,
Each folio a ruin that still shines.

I touched a zine and felt my fingers char,
The paper whispered headlines never run;
Margins crawled with glyphs from ghost bazaars,
And footnotes flared like matches, one by one.

The keepers wear no faces, only smoke,
They shuffle pages back into the pyre;
The catalogs are chants that never spoke,
The checkout slips combust in secret fire.

Whoever reads within this ashbound hall
Will find their memory rewritten all.

V. Fogwood Transmission

A channel lost between the dial’s two ends,
Its signal hums like insects in the walls;
The picture drifts, a forest that pretends,
A tape that spools through static’s waterfall.

The anchors’ faces blur to silhouettes,
Their mouths repeat the crawl of phantom news;
Commercial breaks sell artifacts unmet,
And jingles echo colors you can’t use.

Once tuned, the signal never lets you go,
It loops until the dreamer learns the song;
Each frame a seed that burrows deep and grows,
Each pause a siren calling you along.

The Fogwood speaks in broadcasts never made—
Its tape will play until the self decays.

VI. The Scuzz Monks

They gather where the alleys twist to smoke,
Their robes are stitched from flyers, torn and damp;
Each hood conceals a mouth that never spoke,
Yet chants roll out like sermons from a amp.

They preach in hiss, in dropout, tape-warp drone,
A liturgy of rust, decay, and fuzz;
Their scripture carved on dumpsters left alone,
Graffiti scrawled in names no city knows.

The faithful kneel on concrete slick with rain,
They mark their brows with ash from burned-out bands;
Their hymns are static choruses of pain,
Their relics mixtapes melted in their hands.

To hear them is to vow to entropy,

A monkhood sworn to scuzz eternity.

VII. Ethertown Waltz

A staircase down, and every door’s ajar,
Each room a loop of cables, amps, and haze;
Guitars half-tuned still conjure who they are,
Drums thunder like a storm that never fades.

The bassline hums a heartbeat out of sync,
Vocals dissolve in feedback’s holy gloss;
Each practice take repeats upon the brink,
A chorus woven out of endless loss.

They waltz in circles none have learned to chart,
The measures drift like ghosts across the floor;
Their songs rehearse the fracture of the heart,
Yet always end where silence was before.

And still the Waltz goes on, beyond control—
An echo scoring Ethertown’s own soul.

VIII. Return Toll

The bridge awaits, but darker than before,
Its girders hum with echoes of your name;
Each step returns you closer to the shore,
Yet something lingers, smoldering like flame.

The ferryman is faceless, yet he knows
The fragments you have borrowed from the dream;
He weighs the static clinging to your clothes,
The residue of music’s broken seam.

You pay in memory, in pieces lost—
A song you loved, a street you can’t recall;
The toll is light, yet infinite the cost,
A thinning of the self to cross at all.

And once you wake, you’ll find the bridge still near—
It trembles, waiting, humming in your ear.