He rose,
without the gilded luck of throne-born sons,
but with the raw hunger of a man who knew
the iron tang of turned soil.
His fingers carved roads from gravel and ghost,
watched the land kneel
—an old hound
licking its master’s palm.
He shouldered mountains,
their roots snarling at his feet,
and with each cracked nail,
he wrote the future
in a language
only storms could speak.

---

Forward!
He moved like a blade through the dark,
his shadow splitting the moon in two.
The world bent, a willow to his whip,
and he climbed its spine,
a king cobbled from mud and marrow.

---

But forward is not always progress.
Even the chicken that runs from the rain
may dash into the fire.

---

He erected towers with his teeth,
each brick a molar ground to dust,
each stone an altar where his breath
hardened into glass.
The air hummed, a hive drunk on his want.
No limits, he hissed,
as the future yawned—a quarry of light—
and his hands, hungry shovels, dug, even deeper.

---

Forward!
The crowd chanted his name into a storm,
their voices barn owls shrieking higher! higher!
They crowned him with smoke,
fed him lies like wedding vows.
He danced, embers pooling in his pupils,
each step a earthquake strung through tomorrow’s ribs.

---

But forward is not always progress.
Even the hen that flees the storm
finds its wings singed by the flame.

---

The first crack came as a moth’s sigh—
a hairline split in the clockwork heart.
He chased phantoms: a shadow clutching at its own tail.
The towers groaned, their bones splintering
as the sky peeled back its teeth.
Still, he ran—
faster than the kra in the dam’s grin,
faster than the crow’s laugh chasing his heels,
faster than the thump-thump of his slacked heart.
He chewed khat, charging further.

---

But forward is not always progress.
Even the bird escaping the flood
forgets the sky is made of smoke.

---

Then— Whoosh
the fire.
Not the blaze he had nursed in his chest,
but a furnace born of his own blind sprint.
It ate his heels first,
then his hands, the ones that built and broke.
He flailed—a moth drunk on starlight—
as the flames wrote his epitaph in cursive smoke:
Here lies the man who mistook motion for wings.

---

The earth,
polished to a black mirror,
showed him a stranger:
eyes hollowed to twin charred nests,
mouth stuffed with ashes of the rain
he had spent his life fleeing.

---

Forward is not always progress,
and the chicken, now ash in the wind,
still tastes the rain on its tongue.