Skllzrmy's Open Editions: It Stands

It stands— a monument of marrow and static, its limbs fractured into questions, each branch a wire frayed by grief.

Once, perhaps, it drank from clean rivers. Now the sap it bleeds is digitized rot, a luminous poison trailing in veins that twitch like severed cords.

Beneath its bark—a vicious virus, worming through the grain with spectral teeth, etching error into every ring, turning time itself against the tree.

I am not unlike it— spine crooked with inheritance, bent under the echoing weight of a genesis I never consented to.

My roots search for nothing but absence, gnarled deep into salted soil, drawing up curses instead of water— each leaf that never grew, a word unsaid.

Life did not grow me. It assembled me— from ash and error, then left me to flicker.

Now I burn slow beneath the bark, feeding the signal of my sorrow into a void that only hungers louder.