Love was never a heartbeat. It was the echo left behind after the heart forgot why it was still beating. It arrived wearing another person's face, its hands stitched together from promises that had already begun to rot. I welcomed it. Not because it was kind, but because loneliness knows how to mistake a wolf for warmth. Every smile it offered cast a longer shadow. Every whispered "forever" fed another ghost sleeping beneath my ribs. The thought of love is a clever liar. It builds cathedrals from broken mirrors, then asks us to kneel before our own reflections, calling the illusion destiny. How eagerly we obey. We water flowers that grow from graves, write poems to people who never truly existed, and embrace memories still unborn. Love watches. Silent. Patient. Like a spider waiting in the center of a web woven from hope. It never forces us inside. It simply lets us believe the silver threads are rays of morning light. By the time we understand, the sky has forgotten our ...
My heart walks with stones inside it
forged beneath the weight of nameless days.
Trauma writes its scripture in my chest,
inked in echoes, scars that speak
even when my mouth is silent.
Days stretch longer than nights.
hours drift like ash with nowhere to settle.
I wait in corridors of refusal,
Where doors learn my face
and still choose not to open.
They belittle me, with questions wrapped in smiles.
tongues sharpened into polite cruelty.
They weigh my life on scales of currency,
call me lacking,
as if worth were minted, not lived.
Poverty is my nickname where I stay,
I'm a quiet tenant feeding on restraint.
Hunger is my daily language,
teaching my body humility
before the world teaches me about mercy.
Still, I breathe
not because life is kind,
but because something stubborn remains.
A small defiance, unbought and unbroken,
refusing to disappear.
My heart is heavy, yes,
But it still beats.
And in a world that keeps counting losses,
that alone
is an act of survival.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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