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Love's Dark Reflection #lovepoetry #poetrydaily #poemaday

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 ...
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I Never Cared #sadpoetry #heartbreak #breakup #freeverse

Don’t be naïve.

Do not dress this ruin
in silks of misunderstanding.
There was no hidden tenderness here,
no buried cathedral of feelings,
waiting to be discovered.

I never cared.

Not in the way you deserved,
not with a pulse that quickened at your name,
not with a soul rearranged
by your presence.

I never loved you.

What you mistook for warmth
was rehearsal.
What you held as promise
was practice.

I was only passing through,
a traveller pausing at a lit window,
borrowing its glow
without intention of staying.

A practice was needed.
So was I.

I tried on affection
like a garment before a mirror,
tilted my head
to study how concern might look
if it belonged to me.
I learned the lines,
the softened voice,
the attentive silence,
the careful reach of my hand toward yours.

But the truth,
unyielding as winter,
remains:

I never cared.

Not when you spoke of forever.
Not when your eyes searched mine
for something deeper
than reflection.

There was nothing cruel in me,
only emptiness,
a hollow room
where echoes pretended to be music.

You were real.
I was rehearsing.

And though I stood beside you,
though I spoke the language of closeness,
my heart was elsewhere,
unclaimed,
untouched,
untethered.

Don’t be naïve.

Some people arrive
not as destiny,
not as love,
but as lesson,
passing through the fragile architecture
of another’s hope,

leaving behind the cold clarity
of what was never there.


© 2026 Gloria Penelope

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