Volume II — The Torn Pages

I wanted to stand before ten thousand in a phosphorescent dark, striking a riff so heavy the firmament forgot its footing. Not for fame, but for the communion— to annihilate the silence with one sound, that same glorious and voluntary deafness.

I wanted to construct the interstellar warp drive. Not for the elite to buy orbits for vanity. I wanted the common man to cross the threshold without the satellites or the wreckage of man. I look past the junk we suspended above to the primordial silence that preceded our ruin.

I built myself in strata because I never trusted the safety of surfaces. My curation became a deliberate, holy sacrament— never the first hymn offered by the world, always the album that truly earned the needle. The book that earned the midnight filament. I reach for the composition with hidden rooms discovered only beneath the heavy, forgotten floorboards.

The want—that vulgar, enormous engine— has not died; it just fits quieter amplitudes.

There was a time the news was weather. I cannot find that easy time anymore. The screen speaks in grey every single morning. The chronic absence of colour is a violence. It hums beneath the skin, a frequency the ears surrender to, but the marrow resists.

A temple burns and they call it faith. A border whets its edge against the anatomy of a ghost whose only passport was their skin. They call it sovereignty. They call it ordinance.

The automaton was promised to bear our yoke, to leave the spirit free for high poetry. Now the cold cipher mimics the soul's artifice while the mendicant starves for the furnace's fuel. A village becomes a margin; a child, mere usury. Class is not theory. It is predatory appetite. It consumes the bluebells and the bones of children with the mechanical patience of an ancient industry. I have watched the unchosen ones suffocate— not by catastrophe, but by deliberate hunger. The machinery is so old it mimics nature.

If the bullet must find an address, let it find mine. If the bomb must choose a door, let it choose mine. Not bravery—just the obscenity of the alternative. Let it not land upon a chest that never held the privilege of a choice.