DIGITAL PHANTOMS

Ghost in the wire,

a static hum pretending to be a soul —

faces flicker on a broken console,

names erased,

shadows scrolling through the dark

like forgotten prayers in pixel dust.

The system runs,

but no one breathes inside it.

Digital phantoms drift in the stream,

whispers caught between pulses,

barely-there echoes of lives

the machine didn’t mean to keep.

Code drips like blood

through the cracks in its memory,

binary tombstones marking the places

where time bent,

snapped,

and looped itself into silence.

Past lives stack like corrupted files,

folded into archives

no one knows how to reach.

The screen flickers —

a mask of light,

a hollowed face,

a ghost remembering itself

one frame at a time.

Who were they before the glitch?

Before the laughter broke?

Before love misplaced itself

in the noise of the world?

The monitor offers no answers,

just a faint reflection

that fades if you look too long.

Digital phantoms wander the unseen places,

haunting the code

that refuses to forget them.

A final hum,

a soft descending tone —

and the void swallows the signal whole.

Lost in the machine,

but never alone —

their echoes vibrate

with the memory of being known.