Imagine being caged:
steel and shadow pressing into your skin,
sharp, cold, unyielding –
a prison built to suffocate, not hold.
Your face is gone.
No eyes to see the dark,
no nose to breathe the air,
no mouth to scream.
Just skin stretched taut over hollow bone –
silence where you once existed.
Still your lungs pull at nothing,
still the scream arrives,
but it has nowhere to open,
so it turns back down
and dies where it was born.
Your hands are bound in white lace,
soft as a lie,
twisting tight around a body
that feels stolen, foreign, wrong.
Someone dressed you for this.
Someone tied the knot gently
and called it love.
You sit in the corner of endless black –
no light, no sound, no movement.
No sour, no sweet.
Not a single smell to tether you to the world.
Nothing to touch but the cold that touches back.
You reach for the silence
but the silence reaches first.
It does not break, it leans in,
learns the shape of you,
settles where your mouth used to be.
You are erased.
Caged in nothing.
Bound to forever.
And the nothing is awake.
