Codex Mortis

“Sometimes poison is the medicine.

Sometimes the action of this medicine

is as gentle as waking up,

but sometimes the world as you know it

is dissolved in a torrent of seeming madness,

so that another world might become visible.”

— Dale Pendell

Warning: These pages hold the sound of my collapse.

Into the hollow of a shattered timeline.

These fragments were screamed onto pages,

not written.

A catalog of disintegration:

Thoughts that bled out in real time,

as everything succumbed to chaos.

Read at your own peril – I didn’t write for witnesses.

If you're seeing this, it's because I lost control.

I. Threshold

Before the time of bent tulips

Before I was cruel

Before the jawbone of grief split my mouth

I somehow didn’t see the flags at half-mast—

tired threads unraveling against a sky too pale to mourn.

Soldiers lined the highway—teeth in a dead man’s mouth.

Clouds moved into the animal of their bodies.

— Do you know what it means to salt the windows at dusk?

— To lay chain across the door before you sleep?

— Never count the moths near your candle. You won’t like what happens next.

— Do you still believe in the safety of the ordinary?

— I used to pick flowers without pressing them into pages like warnings.

— It was once safe to trust maps and simple geography.

— Keep something sweet in your mouth when you are crossing between worlds—otherwise, they’ll know you don’t belong.

— Every threshold—a door, a room, a step—is fraught with a perilous possibility, a cosmic gamble where something precious might be lost.'

— Ghost pipe blossoms premature in sector 7 of old growth.

— Morning (?) Topography glitch: nearby ridge appears only at dusk.- no trace by morning.

— 3:47 PM: Moon visible during daylight hours. Too bright, too close.

I used to think sweetness was enough.

I once measured my days in cups of coffee and folded shirts, believing in the small order of things.

I might have listened to you then—your good counsel, a soft blade pressed against my ear.

I might have danced with you, our feet tracing circles in the dirt.

I could have eaten with silverware, drank with cups.

I could have prayed without looking over my shoulder.

I was once like you.

I believed in doors.