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 ...
They speak from tables heavy with bread,
Hands soft from never begging the day,
Calling cruelty order, calling silence sense,
Naming nonsense, the tongue of the poor.
From towers built on borrowed backs,
They rain down laws like cold, sharp stones,
Mistaking hunger for laziness,
And rags for a chosen skin.
Poor orphans wander with empty bowls of hope,
Stomachs singing the song of absence,
Eyes trained to search for mercy
In streets where mercy learned to hide.
Abuse wears gold and speaks with pride,
Its laughter loud, its conscience thin,
While small hands clutch the ache of night,
And learn too early how to endure.
For them, life is an open wound,
No salve, no shelter, no gentle hand,
Pain stitched into every morning,
And reopened by each setting sun.
Yet still they breathe. Still, they stand.
Bones carrying more courage than crowns,
Waiting for a world to remember
That hunger is a normal thing,
And being poor is not a sin.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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