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 ...
A serpent coils within your mother’s deeds,
not born of flesh, but of learned venom.
She fed her children bitter truths,
taught them to name strangers as enemies
before they learned how to listen.
Her words became seeds,
pressed into young hearts like commandments.
What she feared, they learned to hate.
What she despised, they were taught to reject.
Thus the poison traveled
quietly, faithfully
from generation to generation.
Her heart is a house of old anger,
rooms locked with grudges,
walls painted with rage against the innocent.
She mistakes wounds for wisdom,
and pain for righteousness.
Those who never harmed her
carry the weight of her fury.
Those who know nothing of her past
are sentenced by it.
The serpent does not ask who deserves the bite.
And still the question lingers,
soft but relentless as time:
When will she repent?
When will she loosen her grip on hatred
and let mercy breathe where rage has lived?
For until the serpent is named,
until the poison is refused,
her legacy will not be love
but the echo of harm
mistaken for inheritance.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
Comments