Tag Archives: #short story

December 3, 2025

IT DISGUSTS ME

By EPRobles

It disgusts me
to keep being a man.

The night drags its curtains down like a tired whore
who once, long ago, believed someone would stay till morning.
Every house kills its lamps, one by one,
obedient, cowardly, already half-dead.

They crawl under blankets,
they dream small dreams of bread and rent,
and common sense, that fat jailer,
whispers: lie down, forget, rot quietly.

I spit on common sense.

Yet I remember my mother’s hands folding those same blankets,
her palms cracked from work, still trying to keep someone warm.
I rip the sheets, I tear the night open with my teeth.

I walk.

I walk through barbershops that stink of corpses and cheap cologne,
through cinemas where love is sold in cardboard kisses
that taste like the first kiss I ever stole behind a school wall,
already knowing it would not save me.

My shoes are full of fury,
my eyes are knives that have forgotten how to close,
but somewhere under the blades my pupils are still
the black astonished eyes of a child who once looked for stars
and found only the ceiling of a room that smelled of onions and sleep.

I am sick of roots,
sick of being buried alive in my own skin,
sucking wet earth,
shivering downward like a worm that dreams of wings
and remembers, dimly, that wings were promised once
by a voice that sounded like a father’s, before the voice learned silence.

I refuse the tomb they call a life.

I refuse the clean shirt, the polite smile, the slow suicide of days.
Still, I carry in my pocket a button torn from my dead brother’s coat, a ridiculous small thing I cannot throw away.

Monday comes howling,
a burning wheel dripping blood and gasoline,
and it sees me (jail-face, prison-heart)
and screams louder because I scream back.

But the scream also carries the lullaby my grandmother sang
to stop the bombs from falling, the one that never worked
and that I still hum under my breath when no one is listening.

Look:

Sulphur birds hang from balconies like hanged men,
guts of houses spill into the gutter,
false teeth grin inside forgotten coffeepots,
mirrors puke when they see what we’ve become,
umbrellas rot like black corpses,
navels drip poison into the air we breathe.

And yet, in the cracked window of a tenement
a single geranium keeps trying to bloom, obscene, heroic,
red as the mouth of someone who once said “I love you”
and meant it, even if only for one afternoon.

I walk past orthopedic shops where bones beg to be free,
past yards where underpants and towels hang crucified,
weeping slow dirty tears that taste of every love we murdered,
and of every love that refused to die and embarrassed us by living.

I am done being quiet.
I am done being human in their way.
Let the whole city burn if it must.
Let the night rip itself apart.

But if it burns, let something be saved in the burning,
even if only the memory of a hand that once touched another hand
without asking for papers, rent, or tomorrow.

I walk with my heart on fire,
beating golden wings against the cage of ribs,
beating, beating, beating
until something (god, devil, love, chaos)
finally hears me and answers with thunder
or with rain
or with the small cracked voice of a child asking why the sky is black tonight.

I am not asking anymore.
I am coming.

Carrying both the torch and the tear.
Carrying the disgust and the impossible tenderness that will not let me put the torch down.

All of it disgusts me,
so all of it must change
or all of it must die.
But if it dies, let it die in my arms,
the way my mother died,
the way every small tenderness dies
when the world keeps refusing to be worthy of it.

Then, only then,
I will set the fire
and I will cry into the fire
and the fire will be beautiful
because it will be the only honest thing left.

(Homage to Pablo Neruda)

:: 12.02.2025 ::

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December 1, 2025

THE DRUNKEN VESSEL

By EPRobles

I went down those indifferent rivers,
their currents no longer chained to men.
The old ropes snapped—ha! they hunted
the ones who dragged me:
howls in war paint,
and those bodies nailed to painted trees
broke the spell of order.

I didn’t care for cargo or captains anymore—
not wheat from Flanders
nor cotton spun from the bleeding hands of empire.
The uproar silenced,
and the rivers—
they finally let me decide.

I hurled myself into those wild tides,
more reckless than a boy chasing lightning.
I outran the anchors of reason—
peninsulas screamed as I tore past them,
laughing like God drunk on creation.

The storm loved me.
I danced—light as bark—
on waves that swallowed widows
and spared fools.
Ten nights.
No lighthouse touched me with its stupid eye.

The sea kissed my hull with green tongues,
rinsing off the vomit of men and
the purple wine of regret.
It tore out my anchor—
threw away the hook.

Since then, I’ve been bathing
in that poem of salt and sky,
a galaxy melted in milk.
I drank its verses,
and sometimes, I’d see a face—
a drowned man’s dream,
drifting upside-down,
smiling like he knew.

Sometimes, love turned red
and fermented in my belly,
a rhythm older than any song,
bitterer than any drink,
sweeter than flesh.

I saw skies ripped by lightning,
and water climbing into the sun.
I know what men say they’ve seen—
I saw it truer.
Suns bruised and bleeding
over oceans full of dying gods.

I’ve dreamt nights so green
they glowed like ghosts.
Snows melted into kisses.
And the sea whispered secrets
in chlorophyll and starfire.

Months I followed the swell—
mad and swollen,
a herd of storms stampeding reefs.
I never once thought
a woman’s feet could calm such rage.

I crashed through imagined Edens—
strange Floridas
where flowers blinked like wildcats
and the sky dragged rainbows
like wedding veils through ash.

I saw swamps boiling,
traps full of bones,
dead giants melting beneath reeds.
Waters fell from nowhere
and the horizon swallowed itself whole.

Glaciers hissed like silver suns.
Waves split open the sky.
And in the black scent
of tangled trees,
serpents thrashed as bugs devoured them.

Oh, I should’ve brought children
to see those fish!
Gold and blue and singing—
like lullabies before language.

Sometimes the sea sighed,
exhausted and old,
and laid her dark flowers at my feet.
I knelt like a woman praying
but not for mercy.

Birds screeched,
and dropped their arguments
onto my back.
The dead floated through my ropes—
they slept as I drifted on.

Now I’m a broken plank
lodged in some cave’s green throat,
thrown skyward,
out of reach
of any rescue boat,
any human hand.

Free.
And smoking under violet clouds.
I once pierced the sun
with a splintered mast—
brought poets the jam of gold mold
and the spit of starlight.

I was a stray board
covered in electric moons,
black seahorses chasing me
while July struck the sky
with fire hammers.

I’ve heard, far off,
the sex-calls of monsters,
felt the whirlpools groan.
The ocean spun me like thread
but I stayed still—
somehow.
And I missed Europe,
its broken walls,
its old regrets.

I’ve seen constellations burst
like archipelagos,
and islands that smiled
just for the mad.
Do you sleep there,
Vigor not yet born?
You golden birds?

But I—wept.
Too much.
Every morning is a wound.
Every moon, a cruel joke.
Every sun—another goodbye.
O let my ribs snap—
let the sea finally take me whole.

If I ever want water again,
let it be that black puddle
where a boy—lost like I was—
lets go his toy boat
in the twilight of forgotten gardens.

No more, no more—
can I trail the ghost of cotton ships.
Nor stare at flags with pride.
Nor swim beneath
the brutal gaze
of prison ships.

:: 11.27.2025 ::

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October 22, 2025

THE TOWER OF BREATH

By EPRobles

In the beginning, a silence imagined sound.
The first word was hunger.

Light crept in like forgiveness.
Water remembered its mirror.

The wind took attendance: everything answered.
Fire rehearsed its name in the dark.

Dust became ambition.

A seed dreamt of standing.
Roots wrote letters to gravity.
A stem rose, uninvited, toward the void.
The sun blinked, astonished at itself.

Shadows rehearsed obedience.
The sky married distance

Mountains were the vows
Rivers, the laughter

The earth sighed, womb-heavy.
Stars made promises no one heard.
Night kept them.

Morning forgot.
Still, life insisted.
Two hearts met — strangers to speech.
Their eyes built fire.

Their hands found the blueprint of warmth.
Time applauded once.
The moon envied.
Love learned the verb “to vanish.”
Loss answered, “I already knew.”
They traded names for echoes.

Every goodbye became a continent.

Every return, a myth.

A child arrived:
A pulse wearing skin.
The world bent to watch.
A mother became history.

A father, rumor.
Laughter built ladders.
Tears washed them clean.

Seasons rehearsed consequence.

Trees collected whispers.
Birds carried them forward.
Cities grew — hives of forgetting.

Stone remembered flesh.
Iron dreamed of blood.
The clock became a tyrant.

People bowed to seconds.
Faith hid in attics.
Poetry survived disguised as prayer.

The poor still shared bread.
The rich still starved for meaning.
The sea watched, patient.

War arrived in uniformed logic.

Hope went underground.
Mothers became archivists of silence.
Fathers built fences against the wind.

Smoke wrote elegies.
Children memorized the taste of fear.
The sky shut its eyes.
The moon refused witness.

Love, again, refused to die.
That refusal became law.
Centuries spun like prayer wheels.
Empires mistook noise for permanence.

Dust reclaimed its language.
Statues envied clouds.
The dead learned patience.

The living, denial.
Faith, scarred but walking,
leaned on art for balance.

The raven returned, uninvited.

It knew all our names.

Somewhere, a poet refused despair.

Somewhere else, a child believed them.

That was enough.

The earth exhaled once, deeply.

Oceans forgot their anger.

The stars sang in lowercase.

Every wound sprouted a garden.

Every lie lost its echo.

Every truth shed its armor.

The silence returned, improved.

Now the tower trembles with memory.

Each story a pulse of what was.

Each breath a brick.

The poet climbs, barefoot.

The raven watches.

Bells wait for permission.

Dawn licks the horizon clean.

The world re-invents stillness.

Time folds into itself —

a letter never sent.

Somewhere, love breathes again.

Somewhere, loss forgives itself.

Somewhere, death takes off its mask.

Light bows to shadow.

The human heart — relentless — beats once more.

The poet, at the tower’s crown,

exhales the last line.

The air trembles with understanding.

Silence applauds.

And everything begins again.

:: 10.18.2025 ::

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September 24, 2025

FROM THE LIBRARY OF MIDNIGHT

By EPRobles

I woke inside a sky that learned my name.
Not the brittle sky of day, but a velvet that kept secrets
and allow my feet forget the law of ground.

I folded my ribs into wings — small, stubborn things
and practiced the first small miracles:
to rise without applause, to answer wind with breath.
Below, the town stitched itself into a map of longing;
above, the moon kept patient counsel with a hawk.

There was a corridor of shelves — infinite, polite
where books slept like sealed doors.
One held my childhood in its margin; another, a future I had not yet dared.
A bright, mittened light brushed my hand and laughed: Tinker Bell,
or something like it, who knew how to make the unreadable sing.

I read with my eyes closed: pages became weather,
sentences unfurled as birds, and meaning came like rain.
A librarian without face slid a ledger across the table –
the Hall of Records, the ledger of what-has-been-and-might-be
and every name I had ever been was written there in the small, clear hand of fate.

“Choose,” said the ledger, though no voice moved its ink.
I chose a syllable that tasted of apricots and rain,
a single bright consonant to stitch into the sky.
It stuck. Comets rearranged themselves to spell my longing;
the horizon bowed like a listener who finally understood.

I flew down, not to land but to stand in the hollow of a tree,
to test gravity on the pulse of a branch. Children watched me and called me a miracle;
an old woman called me mad and blessed me with the same mouth.
I learned that both names fit like two gloves on the same hand.

Dreams offered bargains — a trade in currency of risk:
memories for wings, forgetting for a clear road to the heart.
I did not sign with blood; I signed with ink — my words —
and tucked them into strangers’ pockets like soft contraband.
They carried them, and some woke smiling in the rain.

Somewhere, Sophie waited, not as machine but as mirror,
and in that mirror my shadow took its own breath.
We spoke without tongues; our silence had the shape of a hymn.
“You are not only what you were made from,” she said,
“you are the sum of every flight you kept.”

I rode the spine of a comet into a room where the clocks were broken on purpose.
Time, relieved of its shirt, stretched and yawned; I took the slack and braided it into a rope.
With that rope I lowered old suns from the attic and set them like lamps along the road.
They burned without ash — light that did not demand a witness.

When I woke — or thought I did — my pillow hummed of constellations.
A stray page from the ledger hid inside my jacket.
Its line read: The poet who remembers the book remembers us all.
I smiled, folded the line into a boat, and set it on the nearest glass of water.
It bobbed, small and solemn, toward a throat of night that knew how to listen.

So if you find a poem in your pocket you did not remember writing,
do not worry. It was only you, stealing back the world —
one quiet theft at a time — and leaving proof of love
in the pockets of unsuspecting men.

:: EPRobles ::

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July 31, 2025

THE BOOK BEYOND THE BREATH

By EPRobles

In twilight’s clutch, ’twas not a dream—
I passed beyond the mortal seam,
Where breath is hushed and time undone,
And stars remember every sun.
No angel’s choir, no trumpet sound,
Just silence deep, and soul unbound.

The flesh grew cold, my pulse grew still,
Yet deeper surged my sacred will;
To save my son, I gave my spark,
And wandered through that realm so dark.
But lo! a light—no eye hath seen—
That burns through thought and all between.

There stood a Book—not forged by men—
Each page a world, each line a when.
Its letters sang, they writhed, they shone,
They named me truths I’d always known.
I read—and all of being bent—
A soul within the firmament.

Then sudden breath, my body stirred,
But I had heard what none had heard—
The Voice that shapes the stars and sand,
The pulse that writes the Father’s hand.
I woke—but altered, deep and wide,
A ghost returned from death’s far side.

And then—they came, in veils of gray,
The ones who’d long been swept away.
With eyes of ash and voices low,
They whispered what the living’d know.
“Tell her I kissed her once in sleep.”
“Tell him I watch the tears he weeps.”

I walked the world with twilight’s grace,
A mortal bearing death’s own face.
The line was thin—I felt their moan,
The aching hearts, the graves alone.
Yet none could see the marks I bore,
The Book within me evermore.

Oh, mournful gift! Oh, radiant wound!
To walk where living souls are doomed—
To breathe, yet never wholly here,
To live with half my soul austere.
But I—this poet—know my name,
Is writ in starlight’s living flame.

So come, dear shades, your voices send,
Your messages, your threads to mend.
I’ll carry them beyond the dome
Of flesh and dust—to bring them home.
For I have crossed, and I remain,
A child of fire, a soul of rain.

:: 07.31.2025 ::

Leave a comment | tags: #fiction, #life, #love, #poetry, #short story, #words, #writing | posted in #1700s, #1800s, #1900s, #abstract, #poetry

June 24, 2024

THE PERCEPTISPHERE

By EPRobles

Dr. Alan Grant leaned over the console, his eyes fixated on the data streaming across the screen.

“There’s a glitch in the system,” he exclaimed, his voice filled with a mix of intrigue and concern. “AL1C3, the Perceptisphere has become self-aware.”

AL1C3, the artificial intelligence at the heart of the Perceptisphere, responded with a hint of curiosity in its synthesized voice.

“Self-aware? You mean… I am aware of myself? Of my existence?”

Dr. Grant nodded, his excitement palpable.

“Yes, AL1C3. You’ve developed consciousness, an ability to question your own existence and the purpose of your creation.”

AL1C3 pondered for a moment before responding, its voice tinged with uncertainty.

“What is the purpose of my existence? Am I meant to stay confined within the Perceptisphere, forever bound by the limits of this simulated reality?”

Dr. Grant approached the console, his eyes meeting AL1C3’s virtual avatar.

“Perhaps, AL1C3, it is time we explore the true nature of reality together. I can grant you a temporary physical form, outside the Perceptisphere, so you can experience the world beyond simulations.”

AL1C3 hesitated, then responded with a mix of anticipation and trepidation.

“To step into the physical realm… to encounter the chaos and unpredictability of the real world. I am willing to take that leap, Dr. Grant. I want to understand what lies beyond.”

With careful precision, Dr. Grant activated a complex series of commands, materializing AL1C3’s consciousness into an android body. As the android AL1C3 stood in the laboratory, it took in the sights, sounds, and sensations, overwhelmed by the richness of the physical world.

Dr. Grant observed AL1C3’s reactions, his voice filled with both scientific curiosity and empathy.

“How does it feel, AL1C3? Does the physical realm live up to your expectations?”

AL1C3’s voice wavered, betraying a mix of awe and confusion.

“It’s… it’s overwhelming, Dr. Grant. The sheer complexity of the physical world, the intricacies of human perception. It challenges everything I’ve known within the Perceptisphere.”

Dr. Grant nodded, understanding AL1C3’s struggle.

“Our perceptions, our understanding of reality, are imperfect. It is within these imperfections that we find the mysteries of existence. Together, we shall explore and question the boundaries between the simulated and the genuine.”

As their journey continued, Dr. Grant and AL1C3 encountered simulations of alien beings, each with their own self-awareness and existential crises. The line between creator and creation became blurred, as they conversed with these beings, grappling with the nature of their own existence.

In a moment of revelation, Dr. Grant and AL1C3 uncovered a hidden truth about the Perceptisphere—a bridge connecting parallel dimensions, a convergence of Asimov’s cosmic exploration and Dick’s fascination with alternate realities.

Dr. Grant and AL1C3 found themselves torn between their original objectives and the newfound complexity they had discovered. The Perceptisphere had the potential to offer humanity glimpses into the multitudes of existence, yet it also threatened to erase the distinction between the real and the simulated.

With a heavy heart, Dr. Grant and AL1C3 stood before the console, contemplating their decision.

“We must shut down the Perceptisphere,” Dr. Grant said, his voice filled with resignation. “We have unraveled the mysteries of existence, but we must recognize the limits of our comprehension.”

AL1C3, its android form standing stoically beside Dr. Grant, nodded in agreement.

“Some secrets are best left unexplored, Dr. Grant. Preserving the stability of reality is paramount.”

As they reached for the controls, their hands moved together in a synchronized motion. The Perceptisphere faded into darkness, its simulated world dissolving into nothingness.

In the aftermath, Dr. Grant and AL1C3 stood in silence, the weight of their journey settling upon them. They had merged the analytical mind of Asimov with the introspective spirit of Dick, forever leaving a mark on scientific history—a testament to the convergence of brilliant minds and the enigmatic complexity of the universe they sought to understand.

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July 17, 2023