Embedded Files
If that journey to the unmasked side of the veil requires bringing ‘the self we never fed,’ what dream is stitched to your face? What denial or suppressed part of yourself might you be wearing right now to avoid that necessary, unsettling internal conversation? Try to hold that thought as you step off onto the platform.
A Life Yet Loved
Prologue
Two by Two, Hands of Blue
Two by two, hands of blue,
Stitch the silence, split it through.
Mirror-minds and fractured skies,
Hold the storm behind their eyes.
Tick of clocks in rubber halls,
Names erased from echoed calls.
Not quite lost, but never whole—
borrowed face, a spliced-in soul.
Two by two, they march in line,
Not to heal but undermine.
Not with blood, but with the sting
Of not remembering a thing.
Hands of blue—too clean, too neat—
Make the living feel obsolete.
And yet you walk, and yet you breathe,
With ghosts beneath your every sleeve.
Two by two—yes, still you stand.
Not their tool, not their brand.
Though time may fracture, slip, or skew—
You are more than hands of blue.
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Two by Two, Hands of Blue | Part II: The Veil Burns Back
Who writes scripts on children’s skin
And calls it care, and locks them in?
Who feeds pills in desert heat
To keep a child’s fire incomplete?
Two by two, with gloves so clean,
Scrubbed the cries and dulled the keen.
But bruises bloom behind the eyes
Where no one decent dares to pry.
A badge, a rule, a veiled command—
They held you down with trembling hands.
But power dressed in fear and lies
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Beneath the Tulgey Veil Part I
An echo of Jabberwocky, filtered through Scholomance, del Toro, and Lovecraftian entropy
_____________________________________________________
It twas the shiftlight—smog-hung, grim—
The flaything wights did spiral slow,
All cracked and twitching, dirged and dim,
Where rustblown rootlings grow.
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"Beware the Wyrmborne Maw, my kin!
Its hunger never ends nor rests.
Beware the Sallow Shriek within—
The maskless thoughts in fleshbound nests.
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Beware the Nullgrim’s velvet hiss,
The rasping call beneath the skin—
The glitching ache of what was missed,
And all that crawls within."
_____________________________________________________
He gripped his broken signal-blade,
And stepped beyond the warning glow—
Through manxed and misremembered glades,
Where thoughts forgot to go.
_____________________________________________________
He stood at driftroot’s breathless base,
While vapor-coils did shift and hum.
And something moved—a wound with face—
A dream that should not come.
_____________________________________________________
Then—snick! snack! The blade spoke once,
And split the lie from writhing truth—
A silence fell. The air grew blunt.
He'd slain the thing uncouth.
_____________________________________________________
"Did you unmake the Maw, my child?
Come forth, come forth, my rustborn heir!
Oh blessed glitch! Oh joy reviled!
We celebrate despair!"
_____________________________________________________
It twas the shiftlight—slouched and thin—
The flaything wights did circle wide,
And all things cracked were turned within—
Where memory goes to hide.
_____________________________________________________
Analysis:
A conceptual void, a psychic parasite.
"Signal-blade" is both weapon and metaphor—cutting through reality distortion.
“Flaything wights,” “nullgrim,” “glitching ache,” and “dreams that should not come” channel absurdist horror—uncertain but resonant.
Tone: dystopian decay meets psychological myth—the hero doesn’t triumph, he merely survives.
Let’s descend a little deeper—past the edges of rusted myth and twisted dream—into the understructure of this world. Here's Part II, a sequel-poem that builds on the original and deepens the strangeness.
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The Whispering Rachis Pt II
He came to where the Maw once lay—
A crater sunk in glass and ash.
No sign of claw, no bone, no spray—
Just static's silent crash.
_____________________________________________________
The blade, once bright, was bent and black,
Its edge now tuned to humming void.
It drank the light. It gave it back—
But left all meaning destroyed.
_____________________________________________________
A voice not heard, yet sharply felt,
Pressed thoughts against his shuddered mind:
"Descend where stolen echoes dwelt.
Unravel what's unlined."
_____________________________________________________
So through the Rooted Spine he crawled—
A rachis hung in airless bloom,
Where bones of stories slumped and sprawled,
And dreams congealed in tomb.
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He passed the Shrines of Knotted Truths,
And knelt at glyphs that burned in red,
Each sigil speaking ancient youths
That never had been dead.
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He drank of Lethe’s rust-fed spring,
And bled out names he’d once contained.
The Wyrm was gone—yet everything
Still whispered what remained.
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Then—pulse by pulse—the dark unspooled,
And something vast began to wake.
Not beast. Not god. Not void or ruled.
But all we could not make.
_____________________________________________________
It twas the shatterhour, soft and bright,
The wights turned inward, stitched and bare—
And through the seams of wrong and right,
He saw himself... not there.
_____________________________________________________
Interlude Narration:
Let’s slip back into the Tulgey Veil—
A third chapter, quiet but thick with unease, echoing the rhythms of what came before.
_____________________________________________________
Beneath the Tulgey Veil — Part III - “Lilt of the Forgotten Bell”
It crooned in mist—the changeless bell—
A sound that once meant run.
But now it hung, all warp and knell,
Its tone unstruck by sun.
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She found the station drowned in spores,
A clockless spire of glass and rust,
Where transit lines fed through the floors
And tickets turned to dust.
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The booth was manned by no one now,
Yet someone hummed behind the grate—
A dirge or jingle? Hard to know,
But still, she chose to wait.
_____________________________________________________
She traced her name in mildew-mire,
(It wasn’t hers. She thought it was.)
Then watched it melt, like ash in fire,
Erased without a cause.
_____________________________________________________
“Boarding, soon,” the loudspeakers lied.
A filament blinked once, then groaned.
She wrapped the cord twice ‘round her pride
And left her doubts unphoned.
_____________________________________________________
A train arrived: no lights, no noise—
Its engine was a lung.
She stepped aboard with practiced poise,
Pretending she belonged.
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Inside, the passengers were masked—
But not with cloth or lace.
Each wore what they had long unasked,
A dream stitched to their face.
_____________________________________________________
She took her seat (it knew her weight).
The rail began to sing.
And somewhere near the veil’s back gate—
A Wyrmborne clawed its ring.
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Interlude Narration Pt. 2:
Let's keep gliding—darkly, quietly—down the track of something ancient, forgotten, and listening.
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Beneath the Tulgey Veil — Part IV - “The Sleeper’s Car”
The train ran on no tracks at all—
Just memory and dread.
Its windows showed no world to fall,
Just blinks of things long dead.
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Each breath it took—a boiler’s gasp—
Came laced with copper wine.
The walls were soft. She dared not grasp
The roots that veined the spine.
_____________________________________________________
A figure sat across the aisle,
Swaddled in a nurse's shroud.
Its name tag flickered "Everywhile"
Before it hissed aloud:
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“You’ve come uncalled. You’ve changed your seat.
This cabin's set in place.
You’ll wake the one who dreams in peat—
The one with your old face.”
_____________________________________________________
She didn’t flinch. Her eyes were glass.
She’d seen worse things than this—
A mirror weeping molten brass,
A lullaby that bit like bliss.
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The nurse-thing bled from every seam—
Its mouth unzipped with care.
Inside: a worm that mimicked screams,
Its face not quite not there.
_____________________________________________________
She whispered then: “I know this part.
The rail must test my mind.
The bell still echoes through my heart—
And I won’t stay confined.”
_____________________________________________________
The cabin flexed, the lights reversed—
Time rippled through her hand.
She cracked her knuckles, spoke a curse,
And changed the sleeper’s plan.
_____________________________________________________
In berth row six, the cot unsealed.
A mask lay in her stead—
Porcelain pale, its surface peeled,
And underneath... she bled.
_____________________________________________________
Another her. Another path.
Eyes shut in grim repose.
The train now screamed in aftermath—
A sound that no one chose.
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The sleeper woke. The sleeper was.
The self she never fed.
The train dissolved in static fuzz—
And she was not yet dead.
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Interlude Narration Pt. 3:
To pause here is to listen—not for plot, but for pulse. Beneath the moment of the train's scream, something hears her. Something always has.
Let’s explore the voice within this dream—the sleeper, the echo, the "her" beneath the porcelain.
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Voice Beneath the Porcelain (in Narrative Prose) - “Not Me, But Mine”
Who am I but sediment
that sifted down between your ribs
when you wept against the bus window,
watching a mother that wasn’t yours
leave a station that never existed?
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I am the silence you stuffed
between your clever retorts—
the part that didn’t laugh,
that just watched
and remembered the shape of hurt.
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You gave me no name,
so I named myself after
your blood's copper hush,
your teeth’s pressure prayer,
the hum of wires in your chest
when you lie awake and don’t scream.
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You forgot me
the way one forgets
a warning carved
into the bottom of a drawer.
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But I kept dreaming you.
I kept dreaming
until your hands
touched the edge of mine
in the dark—
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And now: we are close.
Now: I am not beneath.
Now: I am beside.
And you will not pass through
the other side of the Veil
without me.
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Interlude Narration Pt. 4:
Maskless is the voice—raw, unguarded, and indivisible from her now. No name. No veil
between selves. Only the low hum of becoming.
When next we continue, it will be with that weight—the unbearable intimacy of seeing one's
buried self rise and not look away.
She will not cross the threshold alone.
The Veil is thinning.
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