He built a house from fractured thought, Each beam a wound, each nail hard-fought. He laid the bricks with questions deep, He tiled the roof with nights of sleep. The doors were locked from ages past, But still he knocked—he had to ask. Each hallway groaned, each stairwell wept, Each answer woke what should have slept. The mirrors showed not flesh but fears, The rugs were woven out of years. In every drawer, a scream was curled— A keepsake from a younger world. He called it truth, this sprawling place, But truth had many rooms to face. And in the west wing—walled in tight— He found the boy who died of fright. The boy was him. The man was too. But age had split his soul in two. He begged the boy to speak his name— But silence burned like candle flame. He climbed the attic, cracked and bare, And found his father seated there. No eyes. Just teeth. A grin of rust. The books beside him bled with dust. “Come read,” it hissed, “Come take it all. Strip down your soul. Tear down the wall.” So read he did, and read too long, Until the books began to throng. The pages sang. The floorboards screamed. The walls collapsed. The ceiling dreamed. The house devoured what it nursed— And fed him lines rehearsed in thirst. And there he wrote with twitching hand, His final line, a reprimand: "Knowledge frees men— That is, if it doesn’t kill them first."