Pulse on Borrowed Time

He scrolls the morning open
like a window painted on a wall,
sunlight bleeds, but never warms.
Thumb flicks, a metronome of absence,
each swipe a surrogate heartbeat,
each image a rehearsed life
stitched in pixels and perfume,
while his own skin forgets the language of weather.

He drinks celebrities like neon rain,
Hollywood faces dissolved on the tongue,
their laughter canned thunder,
their sorrow lacquered and marketable.

Music gods bleed gold into his earbuds.
athletes rise in slow-motion ascension,
and he kneels at the altar of highlight reels,
mistaking echoes for bones,

for breath.

The phone hums—an obsessive relic,
smooth as a worry stone worn to nothing.
It promises horizons that never bruise the feet,
love without scent, grief without weight.
Its glow is a soft anesthesia;
he wraps himself in it like gauze,
sterilizing every unscripted moment,
until even silence feels outsourced.

But knowledge is a door that resists imitation,
it will not open to borrowed keys.
Wisdom is not a stream one watches;
it is the cold river that steals your breath.

No secondhand fire can scar the hands into memory,
no vicarious fall can teach the bones their names.
To live is to be cut by the present,
and he, untouched, remains unmade.

Flatlining reality is not an answer.