The Boy Who Writes

I buried a boy beneath my keyboard, but every night he returns smelling of moonlight.

I was a boy who wanted to write sonnets about the moon before my hands started bleeding logic.

Then hunger came and taught me the syntax of survival.

Every compilation error reminded me of the bags of bones beneath my bed.

I learned to call them bugs so I would not have to call them ghosts.

To debug these dreams, I commit murders to my repository.

Each commit buries another version of the boy I was.

Every function I called gave my demons new mouths to argue through.

They grew louder each time I mistook a stack trace for a prophecy.

The boy slips into the night, crossing borders daylight denied me. He leaves his soul in the dirt, guarding the bones of the life I never lived.

By morning, I compile the boy back into the machine.