untethered
You never bowed never kissed rings made of paper, never prayed to their sky taxman keeping spreadsheets on your sins. no, you came in through the back door, half-lit cigarette still burning between the jaws of the void.
the void held you like a bad habit, then flicked you into this blinking hellhole they call living.
but you were something once a sparkplug god, lit up on your own voltage, dancing naked through storms, unbound by fate or karma, speaking only to the nothingness that nursed you, cradled you before you learned to crawl, before you were crowned with your own small divinity.
now you're rusting under someone else's sky, a busted signal bleeding oil in a world built by clerks and cowards your body filing complaints, liver sick of your bullshit, lungs wanting a transfer, heart writing manifestos in Morse code, chemicals marching their private war while you rattle down the freeway like a '73 Impala held together with duct tape and despair.
but that light in you? the one they'd sell their mothers to bottle? it still burns.
fed on bourbon, grief, and fuck-you stubbornness, a busted bulb burning overtime, the kind that makes cockroaches scatter, draws hungry moths and jealous eyes, spinning even as the bearings moan because you don't go gentle, never learned how, never wanted to.
they drilled you down to scaffolding, stitched prayers into your spine like staples in a suicide note, left you coughing up chlorine while the world checked its phone and walked away.
your eyes have always been traitors blurred snapshots, fogged-up film from a life you never signed up for but whiskey lines up the ghosts, makes them walk straight for a minute or two, the only ceasefire in the war.
and still you write. you write. on backs of bills, on receipts for things you didn't need but bought to feel something, because time's not running out they are, filing into their prefab lives while you stare past the ceiling, past the stars, into that dead space between constellations.
the universe grins, shows its yellow teeth, calls you a bug, dares you to flicker out but you keep the bulb alive just to spite it, wearing your shadows like second skin, pressing your face into the warm, soft nothing that hugs you like an old friend with bad breath.
you rage, you burn, you rave against the slow suffocation of everything they call normal.
while wise men nod and accept the dark, you want to fork lightning even if your words only spark in puddles. while good men drown in their reflections, you claw at the surface, refuse to let the water close over your head. while wild men chase the sun with burnt hands, you keep singing even as your voice cracks, even as the sky shrugs you off.
because you're not here to slip away quiet, not here to fold into the dark like a well-behaved shadow.
you swagger through their accusations, rehearse your lines like a two-bit actor in a play nobody paid to see, and they call you arrogant these sleepwalkers with their HOA dues who've never rehearsed death in front of a mirror until it blinked back.
but maybe maybe it is just you. the last feral light in this energy-efficient zoo, the only fool who won't go gentle, still staring through strip malls and sermons toward that place where suns go to die.
not even six of them could outshine your last fuck-you flare, the magic of pure defiance burning in a body that betrays you, the alchemy of turning pain into light, of spinning gold from the lead of your magnificent wreckage.
still burning. still wrong. still real. still you
the last stubborn light in a world that never asked for one, paying your rent in scabs and ash, leaving bloodied napkins behind as the only currency that matters, until the blackout swallows everything else and discovers you were the magic all along.