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 ...
The curtain of death hangs heavy and black,
Is it a veil, or a door unseen?
It sways in silence, waiting still,
Between the worlds we’ve known and been.
Just when the days feel safe and whole,
When laughter learns to settle in,
It falls without a warning sound
And claims a name, a face, a kin.
One chair grows cold. One voice goes still.
A room forgets a familiar breath.
We stand in shock, our questions raw,
Staring into the cloth of death.
Why is it cruel? Why no delay?
No borrowed days, no gifted years?
Why does it close without a choice?
Unmoved by love, untouched by tears?
It does not ask. It does not pause.
It does not count the prayers we say.
It chooses from the ones we love
And draws them suddenly away.
Families fracture in its wake,
Time stumbles, hearts forget their beat,
And still the curtain never parts
To show us where the souls retreat.
We only know it falls when it will,
On whom it wills, in quiet breath,
Leaving us here with empty hands
And questions sewn in cloths of death.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
Comments