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 wove a latticework of malice
In chambers thick with perfumed spite,
Where whispers curdled into verdicts
And envy masqueraded as right.
In clandestine communion, they drafted
The obituary of your ascent,
Architects of quiet ruin,
Surveyors of your firmament.
They named you dust.
They pressed you low beneath their heels,
As though your pulse was an inconvenience,
As though your breath required repeal.
They never glimpsed the ore within you,
The gold concealed in earthen guise;
They saw but soil upon your garments,
Not constellations in your eyes.
“Burden,” they murmured.
A syllable sharpened like winter steel.
Unmindful of the hand you offered,
Open, unarmored, real.
You were the improbable mercy,
The bridge flung over their abyss,
The lantern held in tempests
When no other dared such a risk.
And still they schemed to shear your radiance,
To confiscate your sovereign flame,
To cast you to pavements of derision,
An unnamed hunger without claim.
They longed to watch you wither.
A tattered psalm in a faithless street,
Palms upturned to indifferent heavens,
Dignity was shattered at their feet.
But destiny is not so perishable,
Nor light so easily undone.
The snare recoiled upon its makers;
The arrow curved, the circle spun.
For malice is a self-consuming fire,
A pyre built by its own hand.
And those who quarry another’s future
Unwittingly unroof their land.
You walked unscathed from their contrivance,
Your aura fierce, your spirit whole.
While life, impartial and unsparing,
Delivered harvest to their role.
Thus, you remain.
Not dust, not burden, not undone.
But a testament forged in shadow,
A brighter sovereignty is won.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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