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 ...
No mercy within,
only the quiet arithmetic of harm,
where evil moves in polished shoes
and pretence carries the lantern.
It is the gentle voice
that sharpens the blade,
the smiling mouth
that buries the oath.
Thus the path is led,
not by stars,
but by shadows trained to look like light.
And still the road narrows.
It tightens into a corridor of thorns,
each step a covenant with pain,
each breath, a wager
against the dark.
Life though,
what a bitter tutor.
How do we live
in a world so fluent in cruelty?
Where trust lies pale and unattended,
a fallen monument no one tends;
where truth survives only in thin ribbons,
fragile as winter sunlight,
threaded through words
that tremble
because they are not born of the heart,
oh no.
Not from the heart.
From habit.
From hunger.
From the instinct to endure.
We speak in measured syllables,
ration our faith,
hide our tenderness
as though it were contraband.
We learn to walk the narrow way
with bleeding feet
and call it wisdom.
Yet somewhere,
beneath the thorns,
beneath the staged intentions,
beneath the long apprenticeship of distrust,
a stubborn ember refuses extinction.
For even in a cruel world,
to ask how we live
is already an act of defiance.
To seek truth,
though it be thin as a whisper,
is to widen the path by one breath.
Life though,
merciless, magnificent paradox,
it wounds,
it withholds,
it deceives,
and still
it waits to see
whether we will answer darkness
with its own language,
or dare—against reason,
to speak from the heart.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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