Salvage yard.

I found you where acid rain paints green and gold—

a rust-pool blooming beneath the neon womb.

"Something's still humming in you-but it is not

yours, right?"

I asked, watching your head lift slow:

two glass orbs orbiting a vacuum.

This place was sacred in your cursed sight.

"Here." I handed you a throttle lever,

ripped from a corpse of a machine

that is too dead to mourn.

"This still has torque," I said, voice low,

threading through static—

not yours, just memory fitting

into alien frequencies you'll never hear again.

You cradled the lever in your palm—

cold iron, humming with possibilities.

And I wondered how long

before your grief became raw stock.

We sat in the coils of your heart,

spools tangled like thoughts

too jammed to speak.

I traced your knuckles—ridges of rage hardened into silent geography.

"There's beauty here," I said,

"In every fracture. Every stripped bolt."

You reached for the cracked watch on my wrist.

Its hands frozen mid-thought.

"Time broke you," you murmured,

"and I'm all pulse, no sequence."

I pressed my thumb to the glass.

"Sometimes we rebuild moments

from shards we never meant to keep."

That night, the steam listened.

We welded stories in the half-light,

hammered hope into misfit bolts.

Silence sparked between us,

a voltage teased through frayed wire.

From your wreckage I took a screw,

wound it into your wrist like a relic—

a reminder: time never stopped.

Only you did.

So here we perch. Edge-bound—

two salvage poets in an iron graveyard,

warming our hands on yesterday's burn.

Pretending the rust is just pigment,

and we are not pretending to feel.

In the hush, I knew:

I'm both the poet and the salvage yard—

collecting your pieces

to spark new constellations in the dark.