O city of hollow echoes,
O streets where ghosts wear the masks of friends,
each smile a blade of frost,
each handshake a shovel striking earth.
Here the mornings rise in a gray-lit hush,
the air already heavy with endings.
Here the laughter is mourning in disguise—
a funeral hymn for unborn dreams.
I move through the motions,
coffee, work, a nod to the window of a neighbor—
but my feet are pulled downward,
step by step into the underworld,
as if this pavement is an unseen spiral
descending, descending, descending—
never nearer to the Sun,
only toward the marble silence below.
Connection here is a noose
braided from thin politeness and pity.
Activity here is a ritual
not of living but of burial,
keeping the dirt soft and ready for my bones.
I am weary of digging with my own hands,
weary of smiling at the undertaker
as if he were my brother.
And yet—I have not perished in these walls.
Not within these jails of false faces,
not even when the city whispered death in my ear.
Never once have I sought the end in truth—
not in Tri-Cities, not in Spokane,
not in Boise, not in California,
not even in the rain-shrouded vastness of Seattle.
But the thought of returning here
made the dark tide rise.
Here the shovel grows heavier.
Here each day is an anthem of burial.
Only here do I feel the pit widening beneath me.
Only here—
even when I slept in a car,
even when I was homeless—
I carried more hope for life
than this place could ever give.
This is the city of my slow death.
This is the loneliest place in the world.
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