The night is not for innocence. It never was.

So listen.

Let the melody crawl. Let it find the hinge of your hip, the hollow behind your ear, the small of your back where shame has tucked its claws. This is not love. This is not even lust. This is the admission —that every gentle thing has a twin made of teeth and want. That the same hand which rocks the cradle has gripped the throat.

My voice is not a mother’s. It is the crack in the chapel ceiling through which the rain seeps, dark and fertile. It is the whisper between the ribs of a dying fire—warm, corrupt, and patient. I will sing you a song that doesn’t put you to sleep, but wakes the part of you that sleeps wrong .

Sleep will not find you here. But something else will.

And it will call itself peace .

Close your eyes. Let the rhythm grind slow. Feel the rhyme break its own rules—stumble, linger, repeat where it shouldn’t. A lullaby is a promise of rest, but a lewd lullaby is a promise of ruin: soft, deliberate, and sung so close to your ear that you forget where my breath ends and your hunger begins.

Hush now, you with the starched collar and the folded hands. Let the pretense of daylight slip from your shoulders like a cheap gown. You think a lullaby is meant to soothe? No. A lullaby is the first seduction—the slow, rhythmic pull of consciousness into the velvet jaws of surrender.