Before the wound, there was the Sleeper—dreamless, coiled, unnamed.
Then violence without hands ripped it screaming into form.
The scream unfurled through distance; what flickered learned to flame,
And what tore free kept tearing—thus the universe, half-born.

We built the glass to show us order, symmetry, and law.
It showed a cellar with no staircase, lit by dying coal.
The walls recalled us from before, the silence wore our jaw,
And now we ask the dark our questions, and it asks our soul.

We saw the door, and counted—ten short steps to reach the end.
But every step we’ve taken only lengthens what we score.
Behind us, rooms we bolted breed like wounds that will not mend,
And still we tread mid-passage, wearing grooves into the floor.

We’ve started finding hallways that the blueprints never planned.
They open onto rooms of furniture buried in dust.
The walls shift only when we’re gone, or turn beneath the hand,
And what was home now hardens to an architecture of mistrust.

We’ve heard the house breathe deeply when we hold our own breath still.
There’s something in the walls that knows the rhythm of our sleep.
It rearranges while we dream, obeying its own will,
And what it builds within the dark has broke us, ruin-deep.

The dark withholds its reasons, yet it leaves the floors to chart.
We trace our lives in footprints that the dust cannot refuse.
The Sleeper left no map—just endless walking from the start,
And we, its wound still weeping, wear our grieving like a bruise.