Vowels Dissolving

The encroaching shadows of gravestones stretch like rotting teeth,  
basting tongues with the sour tang of forgotten names—  
each syllable dissolves into the dark’s wet throat,  
swallowing ghosts who still whisper from the wings of the playhouse,  
their voices frayed as moth-eaten velvet, as dust clotting the rafters.  

Dawn stumbles, a drunkard clutching at the hem of night,  
but the shadows gnaw at her fingers,  
suck the nectar from her petals until she wilts—  
a bloom strangled in its own stem,  
spitting out the aftertaste of spoiled honey,  
of promises left to curdle in the sun’s weak gaze.  

The dark does not bargain, only swallows.  
It laps at the edges of memory like a starving dog,  
licking clean the plates of the dead until even hunger forgets itself.  
And we—  
we are the chorus, mouthing lines we never learned,  
our voices swallowed before they can echo,  
before they can be anything but ghosts rehearsing a play  
that ended centuries ago in a theater of crumbling bone.  

The light, when it comes, will be an apology no one hears,  
a gasp smothered beneath the weight of infinite jaws.  
We will have already forgotten how to open our mouths,  
how to speak in anything but the language of shadows—  
long, slow vowels dissolving into the dark’s insatiable