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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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The Game You Thought I Can't Play #breakup #heartbreak #sadlove

I noticed the thirst on your arrival
before you ever spoke my name.

You did not come bearing love,
You came carrying absence,
a well with no bottom,
a hunger dressed in wounded light.

Your stories.
Ah, those fragile, trembling fables,
stitched from borrowed sorrow,
perfumed with practiced despair.
You have wandered before,
Haven’t you?
Sipping from gentle souls
until they ran dry.

You thought I would open
like the others.
Thought I would gather your broken glass
and bleed for the privilege.

But I saw the seams.

From the first tremor in your voice,
from the way your eyes calculated
while your mouth confessed,
I knew this was a theatre.
A story.

And so — I performed too.

I softened my gaze.
I tilted my head in mercy.
I let you believe
I was unraveling.

All the while
I was mapping you.

This was never love.
It was a strategy.

A board between us,
black and white truths,
where every word was a move
and every silence a trap.
A game.

You mistook my quietness
for foolishness,
and for a vacancy.
My restraint
for lack.

Perhaps to you, I looked fragile,
unarmed, unguarded,
a small figure waiting to be captured.

But even pawns
cross the board
and become something lethal.

I may seem poor in your measure,
useless in your arithmetic of advantage,

But I have never been impoverished in sight.
Never bankrupt in wisdom.
Never a fool.

I let you advance.
Let you believe the center was yours.
Let your arrogance bloom.

Because some victories
are sweetest
When the opponent never sees
The end is approaching.

You came to drain me.

But I am not a vessel without depth.
I am the ocean studying the storm.

And when the final piece falls,
You will understand.

I was never a prey.
I was patient.

And patience, when sharpened,
is checkmate.


© 2026 Gloria Penelope

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