Poem Cast — Dark Corners of the Interior

Being grounded sharpened my hearing — it didn't break it.

Season One · Episode I

Recesses of the Mind

True — anxious — very, very horribly anxious I had been and still am; but why will you say that I'm losing it? Being grounded sharpened my hearing — it didn't break it, didn't dull it. Above everything, my hearing got sharp. I could hear every floorboard in the house. I could hear the fridge breathing downstairs. I could hear things three rooms away. So how, then, am I crazy? Just listen. Watch how calmly — how normally — I can tell you the whole thing. It's impossible to say how the idea got in. But once it was there, it lived there. Day and night. There wasn't a reason. There wasn't even a fight. I love my parents. They'd never done anything to me. They just said — no phone until your grades come up — and the phone was already mine, paid for, sitting warm in my hand, and I could not, would not, give it up. So by degrees — very gradually — I made up my mind to tell them I had lost it. Keep it forever. Be free of their rules. The night before, I scuffed it once on the driveway so it would look dropped. Cleared my search history. Deleted the Find My app. And in the morning I came downstairs with my face arranged into the perfect amount of panic — not too much — and I said it was gone, said I'd looked everywhere, said maybe it fell out of my pocket at the bus stop. My voice didn't shake. My mom hugged me. Would a crazy person have gotten the hug? For a week it was perfect. I kept the phone on silent, hidden inside the slit I'd cut in my mattress, and at night I'd slide my hand in and feel it there in the dark — my secret, my own. So you see, they would've had to be very, very paranoid to suspect that every night, after they were asleep, I lay there with the screen glowing under the blanket — that one pale rectangle of light staring up at me like an eye. On the eighth night I was more careful than ever. And that was the night it rang. Not out loud. Understand me — the phone was on silent. I had checked. I had triple-checked. But I heard it ring — a low, clear, electronic ring, rising up out of the mattress, into the room, into my skull — and I lay still and told myself it was the wind, it was the pipes, it was a cricket, it was nothing. But it rang again. And I knew, the way you know in the bottom of your stomach, that it was ringing for me, and that no one else in the house could hear it at all. So I gave it to them. The next morning, hands shaking. And I watched my dad lock it in the drawer of his desk two whole floors away from my bed. There, I thought. Now it's gone. Now it's quiet. It was not quiet. That night it rang from the drawer. Through the carpet and the joists and the walls — I heard it, clear as if it were on my pillow. I pulled the blanket over my head. I jammed my fingers in my ears. The ringing came through my fingers, low and dull and quick, the way a phone sounds when it's buzzing against wood — on and on and on — and my parents slept, slept like the dead, while I lay there sweating and the ring climbed higher and louder, do you understand me — louder every single second. And then, in the morning, it was back. Back in the slit in my mattress. I swear to you I had not gone downstairs. I had not touched the drawer. But there it was — warm, waiting — and when I picked it up the screen lit by itself and showed me my own reflection in the black glass, and I understood that it would always find its way back to me. The notifications came one after another, soft little chimes — you lied, you lied, you lied — and the read receipts under my own guilt turned blue, blue, Read, like it had seen everything I'd done. I gave it back four more times. The drawer. The kitchen trash. The neighbour's recycling bin. The bottom of the lake at the park, where I threw it as far as I could and watched the ripples close over it like a mouth. Every single morning it came home. Every single night it rang — louder, louder — until I could not eat, could not sleep, could not sit at the dinner table without my hands twitching toward my ears. My parents started watching me. What's wrong, they kept asking, soft and worried — and I would smile and say nothing, I'm fine, I'm great — but the ringing rose up under the table, under the very floor, that low dull quick sound like a watch wrapped in cotton — and it got louder, and they didn't react, they just kept eating, kept asking, kept smiling those calm hypocritical smiles — and I thought: they hear it. They have to hear it. They're pretending. They know what I did and they're toying with me. I couldn't take it. The ringing filled the whole house, the whole world, it was inside my teeth — and I shoved back from the table so hard my chair fell, and I screamed: — STOP IT — stop pretending — I lied, okay? I lied. I never lost it. It's in my mattress. It's been in my mattress this whole time. Can't you hear it? IT'S RINGING — it's right there — it won't STOP RINGING —

The house heard everything. It always does.

You only see them when you stop looking.

Season One · Episode II · Gargoyle

Dark Corners of the Mind

Without the dark, no candle earns its name. Without the cold, no comfort in the flame. The philosopher writes by Satan's light: that good needs evil as day needs night. In Egypt he was Set. In Persia, dread Ahriman, lord of the unquiet dead. Tiamat's coil, the Norseman's cunning Loki — mocking one ancient pedigree of doubt and pride. Older than scripture, with a pyramid's hide. They called him the negation — mere absence, a void. Shadow is zero. Nothing destroyed. But hunger is real where bread is not, and silence is grief where word was sought. A death that is nothing to him who is owed is everything black on the borrower's road. Evil is relative, yes — and yet true. Relations are fact, and they cut clean through. He is the friction the climbing soul requires, the resistance that tempers the cosmic fires. Strike out all struggle, all want, all unrest — the man stays amoeba, dull and unblest. No progress, no virtue, no reaching above, just one drowsy ocean of indolent love. So pain sets the thinking, and death sets the prayer, and sin gives to goodness the worth that it bears. He fathered the heretics burned at the stake — Bruno and Galileo, for knowledge's sake. He handed the apple, the first taste of mind, the serpent of science, to all mankind. The rebel, the dissenter, the spark that denies, the dissonance breaking the lullaby skies. He flaps his three faces in Cocytus' frost and honors each bargain, whatever the cost. And here is the riddle the old woman missed, who prayed that the devil might yet be dismissed: unmake him, nor strike him below — God would not be God without him as a foe. He dwells in the storm, and he dwells in the calm, in the curse of the conscious, the wound and the balm. The faithless servant of all that's divine — even the devil is filled with the sign. So tip your dark hat to the lord of the fall, the once-heated fellow who must be at all, for nothing worth winning was won at no price, and no heaven was built without some kind of vice.

Somewhere down the hall, a chain has gone slack.

The dust in here doesn't move. Out of respect.

Season One · Episode III · The Sluicer

Intricacies of the Mind

It came not over field or hill, nor through a window left ajar. It rose where all the pipes run still, where drowned and dreaming creatures are. Three knocks beneath the bathroom floor, a held breath — then three knocks again. The whole of Marrow heard the door that has no hinge, no lock. Old Tom bent down to find the leak. The water reached and took his hand. By dawn he'd changed the way he'd speak, with that slow pause they understand. The baker turned. The vicar turned. Their wet eyes shone a sickly green. The kettles boiled. The lamps still burned. And nothing in the street looked mean. They waved you in. They poured the tea. They kept the taps run soft and low. "Come closer, love. Don't mind the key. The drains get lonely down below." No blood. No scream. No struggle shown. No stranger crossed that line of green. The village stands — but grown alone. One breathing thing. One hidden queen. So mind the gurgle in the night, the three soft knocks, the breathless pause. It does not need its teeth to bite, nor lift a single one of its claws. It only needs the open drain, the patient pipe, the trusting throat. It pours itself inside your brain and wears you like a borrowed coat. ...wears you like a borrowed coat.

End of Season One. A door at the end of the hall has been left ajar.

Season Two · The Signal

Enter the Deeper Inversions

Season 2 launches October 31st. Unlock holders receive Early Access on October 15th — the remaining 90 miles of sub-mountain transit and every hidden sector. Season 1, including the Hall of 50 Dyads, remains open to all.

$1.50 · once — Every unlock enters a draw to win a pair of Bose Premium Headphones — to experience Poem Cast as it was engineered.

Season Two requires clearance.

Unlock Season Two — $1.50 Follow the Signal — Free

A dollar fifty. Once. No account.

🔒 Secure encrypted checkout (HTTPS) · Apple Pay · Google Pay · All major cards — processed by Squarespace, PCI-compliant. One-time — no subscription.

The Season Two Entrance

Four keepers wait behind the gate. Clearance opens October 15th.

Through the gap, a different light — colder, electric.

Season Two · The Signal · Coming Soon

The Fold

We jacked the signal from the broken feed — just a shred of bandwidth, all we'd ever need to punch a hole through every fold and turn while corporate satellites crash and burn. The Revolution will not be uploaded. The fold will not be —

The door won't open any further. Not yet.

Recesses of the Mind

Dark Corners of the Mind

Intricacies of the Mind

Enter the Deeper Inversions

The Fold

Enter the list.