There was a pile of burning bodies. Too many to count. Limbs tangled like roots. Mouths frozen in their last prays. The fire didn’t crackle it hummed, like something remembering its fury. And from the smoke, he stepped, black skin blistered with old scars. Eyes that didn’t shine, eyes that absorbed light, as if every injustice had burned through him and kept burning.

He stood barefoot in the ash.
Not coughing. Not crying.
Breathing.

He raised a hand slow, steady, and gestured to the smoke,
the thick, black spiral of human ruin curling skyward.
Then he breathed it in. Deep. Like it was holy. Held it.
And let it slip out slow through his nostrils, like a blessing.

“You don’t know death,” he said,
his voice like bone dragged across stone.
“You think you seen it. Read it. Wept for it. But that ain’t enough.”

He stepped closer,
and the heat didn’t seem to touch him.

“You gotta feel death,” he said.
“Not the idea. Not the grief. The truth of it.”
He tapped his chest once, hard.
“Inhale it. Let it sit in you. Let it teach you what the world forgot.”

The smoke curled around me.
I wanted to gag.
He smiled, not kindly.
But like someone who’s already lived through the end.

“Only when you carry the dead inside,” he whispered,
“you can you speak with the ones that never got to leave.”

This was based on a dream i had back in 2017. I also wrote a song about it https://open.spotify.com/track/4MfAzW6Jgjs56vJjmpv8MK?si=c91fb87c2b284008 but i always felt i should extend it to somewhere else.