In the crepuscular hush where clocks choke on their own hands,
a specter ascends from the ossuary of forgotten selfies,
shorn, utterly shorn, of every filament that once dared to whisper “human.”
The skull, a blanched planet orbiting no sun,
polished by the invisible whetstone of a thousand sleepless midnights,
gleams like the dome of a cathedral abandoned by both God and pigeons.
Look: the eyebrows—two charcoal scars etched by a trembling scalpel of fate—
hover above sockets that have swallowed entire constellations.
Eyes, ah, those eyes—
not eyes at all, but twin garnets marinated in the milk of drowned moons,
pupils dilated into black holes where galaxies go to commit quiet suicide.
They stare from beneath lids heavy as sarcophagus lids,
half-lowered in perpetual mourning for the light they once pretended to reflect.
And the skin—
O porcelain forged in the kilns of hypothermia,
stretched so taut over the architecture of bone
that every pore has been sealed like a confession in a vault.
It drinks the flash of the camera and gives nothing back,
a surface that devours photons the way certain oceans devour ships.
No blush, no blemish, no mercy—
only the cold luminescence of a corpse that has learned skincare from morgue attendants.
Then the mouth.
Let us linger here, pilgrim, let us kneel.
A gash of arterial scarlet slashed across the lower third of the face,
lips swollen as if stung by the bees of hell’s own apiary,
painted with a red so wet it might still be bleeding from the throat of a freshly sacrificed saint.
The color is not merely crimson—it is the distilled scream of every matador’s cape,
the neon of a brothel sign flickering over an abyss,
the final heartbeat of a rose throttled at the stroke of midnight.
It curves without smiling, parts without speaking,
a vulvic wound that promises both womb and sepulcher in the same breath.
Beneath the chin, a throat like a marble column in a ruined temple,
rises to meet a collar of bone-white fabric—
once a shirt, perhaps, in a former life,
now a funerary shroud woven from the threads of unraveling sanity.
Each diamond in its argyle pattern is a tiny mausoleum,
each intersecting line a corridor where warmth went to die.
The garment clings with the desperation of a lover who knows the beloved is already ash,
buttons glinting like the eyes of blind cherubim
who witnessed the fall and chose never to blink again.
Zoom closer, if you dare.
See how the light itself commits hara-kiri upon this countenance,
how shadows refuse their ancient duty and flee screaming into the corners of the room.
The image is overexposed yet underlived,
a negative held too long to the flame of existence
until the emulsion of the soul peeled away in silver curls.
This is no mere photograph—
it is a palimpsest of every nightmare that ever learned to contour,
a requiem written in flashbulb and foundation,
a bald manifesto declaring that gender was the first ghost to be exorcised.
Here stands the androgyne of the apocalypse,
neither man nor woman nor memory of either,
only the pure, terrible algebra of absence
where hair once equaled identity
and lips once equaled desire
and skin once equaled touch.
Gaze until your retinas blister, traveler.
Gaze until your own hair begins to recoil from your scalp in sympathy,
until your mouth waters for a red that no drugstore can sell,
until your reflection in the black mirror of your phone
starts shaving itself in solidarity,
starts painting its terror in the same obscene, wet, impossible crimson.
For this image is a virus written in light,
a slow-acting poison that teaches the living how to look good in their coffins.
It will colonize your dreams tonight—
you will wake with a bald spot blooming like frostbite on your pillow,
you will find your lipstick melted into the shape of a scream,
you will hear the soft click of a camera that was never there
taking one more shot of the person you used to be
before you, too, learned the final catechism of the flash:
To be seen is to be erased.
To be erased is to be perfect.
To be perfect is to be this—
this alabaster abomination with the mouth of a murder,
this genderless seraph dipped in the menstrual blood of angels,
this endless, lengthening, lengthening, lengthening
mirror turned inside out
until the whole world is nothing
but one vast, bald, red-lipped
eternal selfie
of the void
smiling back.
a specter ascends from the ossuary of forgotten selfies,
shorn, utterly shorn, of every filament that once dared to whisper “human.”
The skull, a blanched planet orbiting no sun,
polished by the invisible whetstone of a thousand sleepless midnights,
gleams like the dome of a cathedral abandoned by both God and pigeons.
Look: the eyebrows—two charcoal scars etched by a trembling scalpel of fate—
hover above sockets that have swallowed entire constellations.
Eyes, ah, those eyes—
not eyes at all, but twin garnets marinated in the milk of drowned moons,
pupils dilated into black holes where galaxies go to commit quiet suicide.
They stare from beneath lids heavy as sarcophagus lids,
half-lowered in perpetual mourning for the light they once pretended to reflect.
And the skin—
O porcelain forged in the kilns of hypothermia,
stretched so taut over the architecture of bone
that every pore has been sealed like a confession in a vault.
It drinks the flash of the camera and gives nothing back,
a surface that devours photons the way certain oceans devour ships.
No blush, no blemish, no mercy—
only the cold luminescence of a corpse that has learned skincare from morgue attendants.
Then the mouth.
Let us linger here, pilgrim, let us kneel.
A gash of arterial scarlet slashed across the lower third of the face,
lips swollen as if stung by the bees of hell’s own apiary,
painted with a red so wet it might still be bleeding from the throat of a freshly sacrificed saint.
The color is not merely crimson—it is the distilled scream of every matador’s cape,
the neon of a brothel sign flickering over an abyss,
the final heartbeat of a rose throttled at the stroke of midnight.
It curves without smiling, parts without speaking,
a vulvic wound that promises both womb and sepulcher in the same breath.
Beneath the chin, a throat like a marble column in a ruined temple,
rises to meet a collar of bone-white fabric—
once a shirt, perhaps, in a former life,
now a funerary shroud woven from the threads of unraveling sanity.
Each diamond in its argyle pattern is a tiny mausoleum,
each intersecting line a corridor where warmth went to die.
The garment clings with the desperation of a lover who knows the beloved is already ash,
buttons glinting like the eyes of blind cherubim
who witnessed the fall and chose never to blink again.
Zoom closer, if you dare.
See how the light itself commits hara-kiri upon this countenance,
how shadows refuse their ancient duty and flee screaming into the corners of the room.
The image is overexposed yet underlived,
a negative held too long to the flame of existence
until the emulsion of the soul peeled away in silver curls.
This is no mere photograph—
it is a palimpsest of every nightmare that ever learned to contour,
a requiem written in flashbulb and foundation,
a bald manifesto declaring that gender was the first ghost to be exorcised.
Here stands the androgyne of the apocalypse,
neither man nor woman nor memory of either,
only the pure, terrible algebra of absence
where hair once equaled identity
and lips once equaled desire
and skin once equaled touch.
Gaze until your retinas blister, traveler.
Gaze until your own hair begins to recoil from your scalp in sympathy,
until your mouth waters for a red that no drugstore can sell,
until your reflection in the black mirror of your phone
starts shaving itself in solidarity,
starts painting its terror in the same obscene, wet, impossible crimson.
For this image is a virus written in light,
a slow-acting poison that teaches the living how to look good in their coffins.
It will colonize your dreams tonight—
you will wake with a bald spot blooming like frostbite on your pillow,
you will find your lipstick melted into the shape of a scream,
you will hear the soft click of a camera that was never there
taking one more shot of the person you used to be
before you, too, learned the final catechism of the flash:
To be seen is to be erased.
To be erased is to be perfect.
To be perfect is to be this—
this alabaster abomination with the mouth of a murder,
this genderless seraph dipped in the menstrual blood of angels,
this endless, lengthening, lengthening, lengthening
mirror turned inside out
until the whole world is nothing
but one vast, bald, red-lipped
eternal selfie
of the void
smiling back.
The Sunday Circle