Mythmakers Often Miss the Stop
Each moment arrives
already threaded—
camels crossing through narrowed eyes,
yesterday's needles.
I see the burden in your face when I get here,
but it’s not your face;
rather a ripple of something older,
residue caught in the glass
nothing but an echo of now. Do you see that?
A life lived sideways,
pressed into the sand.
My bus driver is Atlas today,
holding a world hostage
until I meet his raised eyebrows
with an acknowledgment,
in addition to the usual fare.
The woman on the corner is Circe,
turning glances to granite,
spinning myths into tricks—
even the barista, bean-stained hands,
shifts like Persephone, balancing
her sweet against the darkness.
What is our world if not echoes
refracted, meals consumed after death?
What is real except an insurrection
of stories, clawing at the edges of us,
our susceptible flesh, infected with personality?
These vaunted archetypes,
they hide the hollows in our marrow,
make us no match
for the maps we mistake
for ourselves. You tilt your head,
you ask me what I see. I see, I say,
I have seen, the echoes came first—
shadows carved on walls long
before the names, long before the bodies.
Go ahead, laugh—step into the light.
But remember it moves faster than you
think, burns brighter than you see, and always
drags its shadow behind.
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