The Shadowed Path to Stillness

Footprints made of smoke
lead backward to tomorrow,
while clocks tick in reverse,
their hands reaching through dimensions
to scratch memories into void.

Down this twisted corridor
where anxiety grows like coral,
flowering thoughts calcify
into statues of what-might-have-been,
their faces worn smooth by winds of doubt.

The walls breathe mercury dreams,
pulsing with veins of liquid darkness
that map the geography of fear —
each intersection a choice unmade,
each turn a parallel life unlived.

Here, silence has texture:
rough like static,
smooth like forgotten names,
thick as the space between
heartbeats of quantum butterflies.

Shadows wear mirrors for skin,
reflecting fragments of your self
that never learned to exist,
while overhead, stars collapse
into origami birds of paradise
folded from pages of unwritten diaries.

Time pools in corners,
thick as honey made from
distilled disappointments,
sweet with the nectar of
abandoned possibilities.

At the path’s end,
stillness waits like a sphinx
made of compressed questions,
its riddles written in the
language of falling leaves
and dying light.

But peace —
peace is the moment when
your edges dissolve into mist,
and you realize the path itself
was always an illusion
drawn in phosphenes
across the darkness
behind your eyes.

And there,
in the space between
being and nothingness,
you finally understand:
stillness was never a destination,
but the ghost of your footsteps
learning to dance
with their own echoes.