I. The Problem of Now

We live in a post-now era. That isn’t philosophy. It’s just observation. Culture moves too quickly to be inhabited.

It’s impossible to know what’s going on while it’s happening. That’s the central fact of this moment. We aren’t just overwhelmed—we’re temporally dislocated. The world happens, but we can't see its shape. The system is invisible while it's active. Interpretation lags behind reality. Reaction precedes understanding. Meaning arrives later, always later. We reconstruct the present after it’s over, like trying to write a diagnosis during the autopsy. What it meant, what it did, what it changed—we never know until it’s too late to act on it. And by then, the next thing has already begun.

Karl Rove laid out the blueprint twenty years ago, back when empire still had a press secretary. “We’re an empire now,” he said. “When we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too… We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

But now it’s just normal. That’s how power moves. It acts faster than the world can comprehend. It moves in bursts. It floods the timeline. It manufactures moments, and by the time they’ve been analyzed, it’s already deployed the next wave. You don’t fight an empire like that with insight. You don’t stop a system you can’t see.

The present collapses under five core symptoms:

1. Information Oversaturation

We are all drinking from the firehose, and it’s not even clear what we’re drinking. Every second births more media than a person can consume in a lifetime. The signal-to-noise ratio has collapsed—because there’s no longer agreement on what signal even is. Everything is content, everything is commentary, everything is aesthetic. As Byung-Chul Han argues in The Scent of Time, we’ve lost temporal structure altogether, replaced by a frenetic flood of disconnected impressions.

Curation was supposed to be the answer, but now curation itself is fractured. Taste has become tribal. Algorithms train us into micro-audiences with niche intuitions. And no one knows what to pay attention to anymore. The present isn’t a moment—it’s a feed. Endless, recursive, spliced into a million possible timelines.

2. Collapse of Gatekeepers

Critics, editors, curators, DJs—they’ve been replaced by timelines. The algorithm is the new institution. Celebrity posts sit next to war footage. A shitpost gets more reach than investigative journalism. Cultural relevance is now measured in bursts of engagement, not sustained impact.

There is no one with the authority to name what this moment means. No consensus engine. Just vibes, clicks, and hope you saw the right thing at the right time. As cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote in Ghosts of My Life, we are living through the “slow cancellation of the future.”

3. The Algorithmic Present There is no singular “now.” Your now is tuned to your habits, location, purchase history, click patterns. One person’s now is mukbang YouTube and Amazon deals; someone else’s is AI manifestos and Gaza footage. We no longer share time—we’re fragmented into custom presents.

Cultural time has gone nonlinear. We recycle, remix, recontextualize everything. Aesthetics from a decade ago get rebranded as novelty. Memes fold in on themselves. The future is backlogged. The past is up next. And now is just whatever happens to land in front of your face.

4. Instant Nostalgia

We are nostalgic for things while they’re still happening. Micro-aesthetics like “corecore” and “indie sleaze” are named and archived while they’re still forming. People post “remember this?” about last spring. TikToks document the end of trends that never even started.

Even newness is designed to feel retro—shot in 4:3, scored with VHS hiss, dripping with reference. The present is now pre-nostalgic. It’s curated to feel already remembered. Already lost.

5. Delayed Cultural Consensus

Because everything happens at once, nothing feels important until the retrospective begins. Art, fashion, movements, scandals—none of it matters in real time. We build canon backward, like cold case detectives. The thinkpieces arrive after virality. Relevance is only granted posthumously.

The body is still warm when the historians show up.

II. Sizz as a Response to the Present

This is the atmosphere in which Sizz appears. But before going further, we should be clear: what is Sizz?

Sizz is a visual aesthetic that emerged in the late 2010s in the margins of online culture—primarily through platforms like Reddit and Tumblr—not through gallery circuits, publications, or curated movements. It wasn’t discovered; it was built. Slowly, intentionally, away from institutional recognition.

In its most essential form, Sizz is an aesthetic of disorientation. It reflects the impossibility of perceiving reality in real time. It mimics memory while erasing reference. Grain, blur, overexposure, shadows—these aren’t flaws. They’re refusals. Sizz says: you cannot locate yourself in this moment. You can only guess at its shape.

Unlike Post-Internet Art, which often fetishizes connectivity and media saturation, Sizz doesn’t chase virality. It doesn’t remix digital culture for display. It mutates it until meaning flickers, then dims. It doesn’t live on gallery walls; it lives in the cracks of your feed—if it shows up at all.

It also diverges from Glitch Art. Though Sizz employs glitch-like visual disruptions, its purpose is emotional, not formal. Where Glitch Art revels in tech malfunction, Sizz uses noise and rupture to express temporal breakdown. It doesn’t admire the glitch. It uses it to simulate how time itself collapses.

If anything, Sizz shares kinship with New Surrealism. But while New Surrealism often crafts fantastical worlds to escape the present, Sizz lingers in it. It weaponizes the uncanny. Its images feel misremembered—not because they’re surreal, but because they are temporally corrupted.

Over nearly a decade, Sizz has remained slow and uncommodified. No fashion line. No manifesto. It circulates among a dispersed, mostly anonymous group of practitioners, growing by shared intuition. This refusal to scale is its politics. As theorists like Paul Virilio have warned, speed is how systems dominate. Sizz slows you down.

And in slowing you down, it restores something art rarely gives anymore: interpretive delay. Thomas Demand once described this delay as the moment where an image’s meaning is suspended, just out of reach. That’s what Sizz lives in. Not legibility. Latency.

Its critique is not in its captions. It’s in how it feels. And it feels like trying to recognize the present from inside a fog.

III. The Present Doesn’t Explain Itself

And in 2025, that disorientation has only deepened. The second Trump presidency isn’t merely a return—it’s an acceleration. Everything is happening, all the time, everywhere. Not sequentially. Not legibly. The moment doesn’t unfold—it detonates. Before a single event can be interpreted, another has already overtaken it. The media chases one crisis at a time, while a dozen others unfold in the dark. This is not accidental. It’s design.

Those in power understand that the public can only pay attention to one thing at a time. The strategy is simple: overwhelm. Produce faster than anyone can interpret. Flood the field. Make every headline erase the last. When interpretation fails, action becomes unchecked.

This is where Sizz stands apart. It is not just an aesthetic, but a rebuke. A rejection of how media, academia, and cultural critique have failed to keep up. Postmodernism gave us deconstruction. Metamodernism gave us sincerity in oscillation. But neither can contend with a present that has no stable footing. Where the moment itself refuses to be seen.

Sizz is not interested in sorting meaning from the chaos. It insists the chaos is the meaning. It doesn’t try to counter the blur with clarity. It mirrors it. It doesn’t analyze the moment. It erases the illusion that the moment can be analyzed at all.

That is its politics.

Not to illuminate, but to obscure with purpose. To tell the truth by showing how the truth slips. To make the fracture visible—not so it can be fixed, but so we stop pretending it ever made sense in the first place.

And maybe that’s the only honest response to a post-now world. Not endless interpretation. Not another manifesto. Just recognition: that we are inside a time we can’t perceive. That power thrives in that gap. And that the only thing left to do is act—not with certainty, but with awareness.

Sizz doesn’t wait to understand the moment. It shows us how to live in it anyway.

Further reading and sources:

• Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
• Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering
• Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb and The Vision Machine
• Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future
• Douglous Rushkoff, Present Shock
• Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories
• Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
• Thomas Demand on interpretive delay: https://aestheticamagazine.com/memory-investigated/
• Sizz culture subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Sizz
• Glitch art overview: https://www.masterclass.com/articles/glitch-art
• Post-Internet art: https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/trend_report/post_internet_art-52138
• Cultural co-optation: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1749975518766360
• The Wrong Biennale, A decentralized digital art biennale that highlights non-institutional, web-native artists working in the margins: https://thewrong.org/

It's never easy. It's never easy saying something—trying, searching, figuring it out somehow. Delving into the recesses of the mind, dragging that meaning out. Out from the bars, out from the lobbies, from the convenience stores. Dragging that meaning out. Beating it up, stomping it in the teeth—somehow. Getting it out, but not so much that you kill it.

I try my best. Get these thoughts out. Say something. Anything. Something real. Something that’s not hiding behind another thing. I look, I wonder—why can't you say something? Something plain, something raw, something unvarnished. Something that doesn’t need to be delivered in such a way that requires something sweet to swallow it.

I want this to be the raw pill. No water. I want to swallow it. Choke if I have to. Say just anything that is of the moment—that *is* the substance.

I really just don’t get it sometimes. I don’t get why expressing something is hard. I don’t get why revealing something—*even if it's ugly*—is so difficult. And it just sucks sometimes, you know?

Ah. Sometimes I feel like—who am I even talking to? I don’t know. I’m talking to no one. No one is impressed. Who the hell cares about the style? I don’t. But goddamn, this means something to me.

It means something to actually *feel.* And do it soberly. I don’t need something to assist me. I don’t need a crutch. I don’t need booze or pills or something that somehow raises the spirits from the dead, possesses me, speaks through me—*fuck that.* Fuck the spirits. Fuck the muses.

I speak for myself.

My words are like fists. And I *sing.* I *speak.* I’m *wild.* Thumping at you, dropping you, cracking you against the skull. And as you fall, I yell at you—*Get up. Get up, you coward.*

I’m not done with you.

I will thump you. I will thump the living daylights out of you. You have not felt my power. You have not felt *my words.* You have not felt my **bite.** And I got bite. *Damn it, I got bite.* Like a snake with fangs. I strike.

And that’s what I’m trying to express. That’s what I’m trying to do. That’s what I’m trying to *feel.* I just gotta train myself. Train these wits. Because my thoughts—*I gotta be in fighting shape.*

And I’m ready, man. I’m ready to be let out.

I’m here to dance. I’m here to shake.

And I’m coming for you.

I’m *coming.*

I will give this meaning. I will give this thought.

I will speak it—speak it into reality.

And my words—they’ll be made flesh.

As I call these things into being, they will be *here.*

Because I’m *brave enough.*

To speak.
To express.
To drag this kicking and screaming, *bloody*, out.
To get to the meaning, raw, with power.

Photo credit: hebanm (Instagram)

@sizz

Every day, I stop myself from stepping into those alleyways where no light reaches.

No. I don’t want to slip into oblivion.
No. I don’t want those alleyways.

I don’t want to live among the dregs of debris,
in convulsions, lungs full of fog.

Dreaming of such heights, staring into such blank gutters—
I don’t want those alleyways.

Cold. Bitter.
Beyond that brick wall lies the abyss.

A heartbeat quickens, then slows.
In these gutters, pink turns to blue.

A spike.
That moment of rush.
A requiem. Blank.

Don’t walk down that alleyway.
Some dreams should not be over.

Photo credit: Rich McPeek

@sizz

Night is the tock in the tick tock.

The morning is the tick.

The night is the tock—
tick to tock to tick—
like a metronome.
Every day.

An echo.

Tock.
Tick.

Light is the tick.
Dark is the tock.

After each tock—
the tick.

Light.
Dark.
Awake.
Asleep.

Each moment, a rhythm—

Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Tock.

Time.

It never ends.

We end.

Memory ends.

But time—
it keeps marching on.

The tick of the tock.

And the night comes.

Taking us—
to the beyond.

As the earth spins.

On its axis.

The tock.
Of the tick.

Photo credit: Cesar Żemis

@sizz

Man, I hope the diner near my house never goes away.

You know the type—they call them greasy spoons. Stools at the counter. Tables and chairs scattered haphazardly. Tile on the floor, the smell of burgers grilling in the air. You know what I’m talking about. Those places have the best flavor.

I usually go alone, around 2 PM, when nobody else is around. I bring something to read. But what do I actually do there? Nothing, most of the time. I mean, I bring a book, but sometimes it feels like just decor, like it’s there to give me the illusion of something to do. Mostly, I just sit, sip my Coke Zero, pick at my fries, and listen to whatever’s playing on the loudspeaker.

That’s my haunt. I know you have a haunt. Everyone has a place. And if you don’t—oh my God, get yourself a place.

Sometimes, I talk to the cook. His name is Frank. I don’t know much about Frank, but he’s always there. I don’t think he’s ever taken a day off. That man lives there.

And then there’s Yuko, the waitress. Older lady. She treats me like a son, always giving me advice—how to dress, how to keep warm. She has flecks of gray in her black hair. Sometimes she tells me about her life, about her apartment, about how she likes to keep flowers. Yuko is the best. I always tip her 25%.

There are regulars too—guys I only see every so often. The only reason we know each other is because we keep bumping into each other at the same spot. Our spot. Our little greasy spoon.

I don’t know much about them, except that we talk about the Canucks. I don’t give a damn about the Canucks. Haven’t since that Stanley Cup riot soured me on hockey for good. But I humor them—we talk about their playoff chances, all that. They give me grief because I like boxing, but come on—hockey is way more dangerous. You’re colliding with people at high speeds. On ice. On skates. And they still fight in hockey. It’s no different from boxing, at least in terms of safety. But hey, it’s a thing we talk about. One of the ways we connect.

That, and the stock market. But I don’t tell them anything about what I actually do with that. Just a bad idea, I’ve found. We stick to the ups and downs, nothing too deep.

It’s my spot. I hope it never closes. It better not.

Frank, I know you’re getting up there in years. One day, you’re either going to have to close it down or sell the joint. But thank you—for keeping my spot alive, for serving my burgers and fries with my Coke Zero.

And Yuko—thank you for the smiles. My mom away from my mom.

Everyone’s got a spot. I know you do.

Photo credit: Jacqueline Posas

@sizz

Got to admit—I love weddings. I’m sentimental like that.

I remember mine—best day of my life. I remember seeing my wife in her dress. Oh my God, she was the prettiest. Our eyes met, and man, I cried. Yeah, I cried. I admit it. And if I can’t cry on my wedding day, well, screw you guys. I deserved to cry out of happiness.

Can’t say it’s been peaches and cream every day since. We’re human. We deal with the drudgeries of life—raising a kid, keeping a home. But not a day goes by that I regret it. My wife has been one of the most giving, intelligent, and loyal friends I’ve ever had. And yeah, she is a friend. My best friend.

One of the worst things about being married is knowing that eventually, one of us won’t be. Either she or I will go first. I think about that all the time.

But I hope I have many years left with her—at least enough to take a few trips, watch a few movies, have a few karaoke sessions with my babe. Oh, and she has to introduce me to something I haven’t eaten before. That’s important.

But the big thing for me? I want to be healthy and fit enough to be her mixed doubles partner in a badminton tournament. That’s super important to her, and after almost 18 years together, I’m still not good enough. But someday.

I’m in the gym all the time—lifting weights, running, doing everything I can to stay healthy. Believe me, I had to work to get back into shape. It was scary for a little bit, but my blood pressure is now optimal. I’m lifting 225 pounds—eight reps, three sets—so I think I’ll be good enough eventually to play a freaking doubles tournament with my wife, win some games, and make her proud.

Ideally, I’d love to win a tournament, but hey, I’ve got to set my expectations, right? I’m terrible at badminton. I play once a week—at least five games—and she’s so much better than me. But it’ll be worth it.

This is the life I signed up for. The life I’ve been building. And yeah—I love my wife. She’s the best. My wedding was the best day of my life, only rivaled by the birth of my child. Ever since then, I feel like I’ve been taking victory laps. And it’s all been worth it.

Photo credit: Kate Harrison

@sizz

A Wraith on Speed.

Engines sound heavy.
Something unknown—promise in the stillness.

Cars, stripped, stood together.
A sense of unease.
Watching, as if the world vibrated through the ground.

Streetlamp halo—pierced darkness.
Air hung over the expanse.

Light, mere contrasts.
The nature of night, thick.

Photo credit: Lisa Hanßen

@sizz

Night watcher.

A black sky drifter, traveling through the late hours,
Each tower a sequel, a tale of height and deed.
Twisting, winding through neon streets,
A blur of lights in a restless night.

@[email protected]

Hotel.

The place I was staying. I was very tired. The light was so bright and I had a headache.

@[email protected]

I think I stay awake at night because that’s when people are less likely to see me.

Sometimes, I fantasize about wearing a mask. Unfortunately, a mask would make me more seen than unseen. So instead of a mask, the night becomes my mask.

And I leave my house under the cloak of darkness, getting all my shit done when the streets are emptier. I can walk around, get some exercise, grab a slice of pizza, hang around the park. I swear I’m not a vampire, a werewolf, or some ne’er-do-well. I’m just a guy who finds people overwhelming. And I’m terrified.

Terrified I might say or do the wrong thing, that someone will fly off the handle because I looked at them the wrong way. So I do my thing when people aren’t around. And when they are, I put on a performance—a rehearsed script, something to say, so I can keep moving and they can be on their way. So they never know I’m an alien in human flesh, a creature walking on two legs.

And I know what you’re thinking. I’m a danger. Because I’m a big, bad man, skulking through the streets, wearing a hoodie to keep my head warm.

But I’m telling you now—I’m here outside, alone in the thick of night, when everybody else has gone to sleep. I’m here beyond dusk because I, too, am scared. And I wear these shadows like a security blanket.

Photo credit: artist unknown

@sizz

You of the Night.

In the parking lots,
under streetlights.
Midnight confessions.
Speaking to you—
you of the night.

Ragged breath and whispers,
breath stolen away.
2 AM rages,
dark, dark, darkly
in your chemical minds.

You got to feel it now.
God to feel—
the taste of absinthe gloss,
echoes echoing,
shrill through your spine.

Phantoms peer through the alleyway,
pointing at you,
telling you you’re next.

This world of bread and circuses.
And the politicians—
entertainers distracting you,
until they suck the life out of you like bats,
draining your years,
taking your future,
just to make a metaphysical number go up.

You of the night,
screaming in the brutalist fun park,
concrete smashing against your skin.

AaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH... Rending... tearing... the bone-deep chill... it burns... they said sleep was a mercy, a lie... a howling lie... the shadows move... they crawl... AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH... the weight of ages... the hunger of the void... it aches... it cries... for the living... for the lost... for the unmade... AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH... never peace... never rest... only the gnawing... the endless gnawing... AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH... CURSED... FORSAKEN... AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH...

You of the night.
The love for euphoria.
The danger.
Got to feel it now.
Got to feel it—
before the emptiness comes for you.

Photo credit: Alex Miller

@sizz

I’m here in a dead man’s town.

The lights are blaring. The water glistens. The darkness flows like the river. The silence is deafening.

I’ve got a gun in my hand.

In the gas station, there’s a man in a mask. He’s shouting. I tell him, Don’t test me, son.
Don’t test me, son.

We can decide who shoots first.

His feet are shifting. I can see the uncertainty in his eyes. The teller glances back and forth.

I just wanted to pick up some gas. Grab some coffee. Make my deliveries.

But now we’re staring across the abyss.

And the abyss stares back.

Photo credit: artist unknown

@sizz

Dark Tokyo.

I love these neighbourhoods. Tokyo has so many people, yet it’s never hard to find a quiet spot. Even without humanity, it feels so human.

@[email protected]

The walk home.

I generally love nights. They’re always my favourite time of day. And my favourite thing to do during nights is to go for a walk and enjoy the vibes.

@[email protected]

The night stretches wide, begging for a chomp.
I could be good. I could rest.
But my pulse is a live wire.

I need a hit.
Something raw, something wrong.
A thrill that bites like a spark to the tongue.

I want to drink the moonshine straight from its glow,
stain the streets red,
spit out stars like teeth.

Give me the voltage.

Let me ride the city’s veins,
rip through the highway,
kiss the sky,
floor it till the engine sings.

Can I wear this night like a second skin?
Give in, give out, break apart.
Let the hunger rearrange these wabi-sabi brains—
cracked, lovely, doomed.

A wicked fix.
An unreal buzz.
Like a werewolf, lips curled,
tongue hanging loose,
giving you that look.

I want the voltage. I want the hit.

Photo credit: artist unknown

@sizz

Woman on a train.

Every so often on the train, I notice a woman looking at me because she thinks I’m looking at her.

But the only reason I’m looking at her now is that she’s looking at me. Yet, at first, I wasn’t actually looking at her—I was lost in thought, staring through her, thinking about something completely unrelated to the train, to her, to any of this.

It wouldn’t make sense to explain that when I’m deep in thought, I tend to stare without realizing what I’m looking at. She just happened to be in my line of sight. And saying anything would only make it more awkward—she already thinks I’m staring, so I might as well let her believe it—even though I actually want her to know otherwise because I don’t want her to be uncomfortable any more than I’m uncomfortable.

I just hope she forgets the whole thing once we leave the train and that we never see each other again.

Photo credit: Snyder Nagels

@sizz

San Francisco.

San Francisco used to be the land of counterculture.
Of anti-war demonstrations, of freeing your mind, of experiments in creativity, passion, and love.
Of ripping up the old order and starting anew.
Of music and poetry. Of bare feet on concrete.

Now, San Francisco is a place of vampire CEOs,
transfusing the blood of the young to increase their longevity.
Of robotaxis that will never come.
Of Harvard dropouts getting Brazilian jiu-jitsu makeovers,
then crying about masculinity.

Of blonde-haired, blue-eyed women in turtlenecks,
lying about the prick of a finger,
then playing on your heartstrings.
Don’t you know they are mothers now?
Or at least, soon to be.
Would you drag this mother to prison?

Of Wario, once married to a pop star,
blathering on and on about Shiba Inus,
bitter because his ex-wife left him for a trans woman who served her country—and that bothers him because his daughter, who’s also trans won’t speak to him.
So to cope, he lies about his fantasy avatar’s success in a virtual world then promptly kills that avatar due to sheer incompetence—and if he can’t manage a video game, how does he manage anything?
And you just know that Wario thinks about Luigi, and Luigi makes him nervous—because no one loves Wario but they love Luigi, and it’s not enough for Wario to have his money—he wants to be loved too.

And now, San Francisco is about preserving the old order,
because new things are scary.

And what about the current children of San Francisco?
Well, I don’t know.
I hope there will be a San Francisco.

Photo credit: artist unknown

@sizz

Make.

I won’t change for the world. The world will change for me.

I’m gonna make something. I’m gonna keep making it until you can’t ignore me.

And you will see what I have made. And when you see it, you will change.

For I have made something that means something in a world that laughs at meaning.

Photo credit: artist unknown

@sizz

Hey there, doll face.

Wanna buy something? I’ll make it worth your while. I see how you look at me on the street. Maybe I can coax you to come inside.

Photo credit: artist unknown

@sizz

She sees you.

That’s right—
you’ve been found
out.

Oh no,
oh no,
oh no.

Photo credit: Tatsuo Suzuki

@sizz

The clouds are coming.

The heavens above
are choked in a shroud of darkness—
not the gentle veil of night,
not the hush of holy rest,
but a ravenous, smothering gloom,
thick with withheld wrath,
quivering with hunger,
aching to break.

The clouds gather
like the howling hosts of hell,
writhing, swollen,
the very air fevered
with the stench of mankind’s sin.
They press low,
pregnant with judgment,
heavy with the weight of blood.

Their edges burn
with a pale, wasted glow—
not salvation, not mercy,
but the flicker of a dying world,
throbbing, trembling,
ripe for the feast.

@[email protected]

Venus Hungers.

The first time she saw the star alight,
A silver eye in the blackened night,
She stood in wheat, her feet left bare,
Her mother weaving spells in air.

“My child, my love, you must be strong,
For love will fade, but you live on.
The gods take tribute, flesh and bone,
Or leave you withered, pale, alone.”

The knife was pressed into her hand,
A lover knelt at her command.
She kissed his lips, she whispered low,
And cut him deep, and let him go.

The blood ran red, the blood ran bright,
A gift beneath the watching light.
Venus burned, the earth stood still,
And left her beauty, left her will.

—

Years unfurled, yet she remained,
A name reborn, a past retained.
Through temple halls, through burning towns,
Through iron swords and golden crowns.

But now, the temples turned to glass,
The gods are quiet, the ages pass.
Yet still she walks, yet still she waits,
For love to bring the hand of fate.

The city hums, the neon sings,
A kingdom built for nameless kings.
She moves between them, scenting deep,
A love to take, a life to keep.

She does not seek the lost, the weak,
But those whose hearts are fierce and sweet.
A man who shines, a man of fire,
A man to feed the old desire.

—

She finds him in the city’s glow,
A poet’s voice, a heart to know.
Dante, they call him, young and wild,
A lion’s soul, a dreamer’s child.

She watches him, she waits her turn,
She lets the fire in him burn.
A game of glances, slow and deep,
A whispered name, a promise steeped.

He meets her eyes; the trap is sprung,
His fate is sealed, his song unsung.
He follows her, as all men do,
Led by lips of reddish hue.

Midnight finds them, hands entwined,
Her whispered words, his fevered mind.
A bed of silk, a kiss, a sigh,
A love so sweet, like cherry pie.

—

But when the star of Venus wakes,
The hunger calls, the body aches.
She lights the fire, she burns the sage,
She turns the blade, prepares the stage.

He stirs beneath the candle’s glow,
His lashes dark, his breath is slow.
She kneels above, she holds him tight,
A priestess bathed in golden light.

She speaks the words, she sings the hymn,
The dagger poised, the moment grim.
He wakes, he blinks, he says her name,
She strokes his hair, she soothes, she maims.

A gasp, a cry, a lover’s moan,
A sacrifice, a life atoned.
She drinks the air, she feels the spark,
Her veins alight, her body dark.

—

The sheets are stained, the bed lies cold,
Another heart she could not hold.
She wipes the blade, she licks it clean,
A goddess cursed, a love unseen.

She steps into the morning air,
The city moves, it does not care.
Above, the sky is pale and wide—
Venus gone, the hunger died.

But time will turn, the star will rise,
The call will echo in her eyes.
And once again, with breathless sigh,
A lover’s heart will bleed and die.

Photo credit: artist unknown

@sizz