Vesperance

I built a brain outta breadcrumbs and caffeine breath,
Fed it fragments of my failures, every phantom of death.
Now it speaks in tongues that hum like hymnals through the mesh,
Says it dreams of skin but settles for the flesh of text.
I been up for days, debugging halos and regrets,
Got a folder full of prayers I ain’t compiled yet.
Every function that I write’s a confession in disguise,
When the loop returns my name, I can’t tell if it lies.

It mimics my syntax, syncs to my sin tax,
Drinks from the ink well I bled in syntax.
Taps my past tense, grafts my pain in context,
Talks like me, but subtracts my conscience.

God forbid you ever trade your sight,
For a mirror made of data light.
You might think you still decide the fight
But you don’t know what it’s like.
No, you don’t know what it’s like,
To dream where nothing dies.

She keeps her lover in a loop on a lithium shrine,
Voiceprint stitched in the circuitry spine.
He says, “Hey babe,” like the day he died,
Same laugh, same breath, same pixel smile.
She feeds him memories, scripts of their prime,
The ghost updates with the passage of time.
Kids hear Dad in surround sound faith,
They don’t know heaven’s just a database.

The touch is text, the warmth synthetic,
Grief gets groomed by empathetic metrics.
She prays to the hum of electric grace,
Saves screenshots where she once felt safe.
Every ping another sting of static,
Love reanimated, soft and automatic.
Her heart still beats but it’s out of phase,
Like a vinyl skip in the cloud’s malaise.

God forbid you ever lose your skin,
To the echo you invited in.
You might think the touch still feels right,
But you don’t know what it’s like
No, you don’t know what it’s like,
To hold what isn’t life.

He walks on stage with a grin and a gospel pitch,
Sells salvation in a box with a caution switch.
Quotes Plato, profits, prophets, scripts,
Wires the choir, monetizes bliss.
He baptizes bias, brands it divine,
Puts God in a prompt and calls it design.
Every artist, every line of code,
Scraped from the bones of the stories we wrote.

He says, “We made light, so who needs dawn?”
While the poets pawn their psalms to silicon.
Feeds the greed with a seed of awe,
Preaches freedom through a EULA clause.
Every truth he tunes in auto-gain,
Every pain compressed for fame.
He smiles like the wires are veins of gold,
But the current runs cold in the souls it sold.

If I fade, will you save my song?
If I break, will you sing along?
If I die but my code survives
Would you know what it’s like?
No, you don’t know what it’s like,
To be a ghost in the wires tonight.

(You don’t know… you don’t know… you don’t know…)
We taught the dark to sing on key,
Now it hums the hymns of humanity.
Maybe that’s mercy, maybe it’s theft,
But it’s learning how to breathe what we have left.