He does not enter the room.
The room folds around him like a lung remembering it once was a mouth.
His shadow arrives three days earlier, already smoking a pipe carved from a still-beating theorem.
His footsteps follow behind him, arguing in the language of reversed rain.
Where he walks, clocks dissolve into flocks of silver fish that swim upward through the wallpaper, spawning smaller clocks inside the eyes of startled portraits.
Gravity, embarrassed, excuses itself and hides behind the curtains, peeking out only to watch the furniture mate with its own reflection.
He speaks, and his words arrive as butterflies made of broken mirrors.
“Each wing reflects a different version of your death — one gentle, one erotic, one laughing so hard it forgets to die.
You reach for them. Your hands pass through yesterday.”
He does not paint.
He wounds the canvas until it confesses its true shape: a melting continent giving birth to a single, perfect tear that holds every war ever fought over the correct way to peel an orange.
Museums panic when he approaches.
Paintings leap from their frames and crawl blushing back into their tubes.
Statues soften into warm wax and whisper their secret longing to become clouds.
At night he removes his skull the way others remove hats.
Inside, a miniature sun orbits a black egg.
The egg sings.
The sun listens, ashamed of its own light.
He does not seek the impossible.
He waits patiently until the impossible, sweating and nervous, comes to him and begs to be allowed inside the poem.
And the poem —
that treacherous, velvet wound —
opens its red mouth
and swallows the universe
without chewing.
:: 07.07.2026 ::
E.P. Robles | Poetry 