You left me behind
with my necklace
crumpled in a box,
a parting gift,
or quiet metaphor.

Once it gleamed,
a thing of grace
made delicate by time
and worn close to my heart.

But in your careless hands,
it twisted
knot by knot,
beauty undone
by what you couldn’t cherish.

I sat for hours,
fine tools trembling,
trying to unmake
the damage you left
a snarl of silver and sorrow.

Now it’s 1 a.m.,
and I’m unraveling too,
threading grief
through every loop of thought:

Was it you?
Was it me?
Did we both tug too hard
on something fragile?

Why did we choose
each other at all,
if neither of us
knew how to love gently?

She showed up
Like sunlight climbing the edge of dusk,
A promise I hoped for,
A sign I silently trusted would come.

At the first slit of light,
I felt reborn
Lifted from the depths of silent agony
Where shadows had made their home.

The crying child inside me hushed;
Eyes locked on a distant score,
Miles apart,
Yet never closer than before.

Her gaze met mine
A breach in the fabric of space and time,
Carried on doves' wings,
And placed, trembling, in my heart.

I can’t sing now
But I no longer weep.
My heart rejoices quietly.
The pain? It dims.
The sorrow? Disperses.
And I am reborn again and again.

As the sparrow soars
And the ram frolics with the lamb,
I chase your echo
Until my breath gives way.

Then, with my final gasp,
I sink into a forest of sleep
Still, silent,
Awaiting love’s gentle conceit:
That something fleeting
Can still be forever.

Pink lighter on the stair
How on earth did you get there?
Were you dropped mid sigh in a moment of despair,
Or left behind by someone seeking cleaner air?
You glint at me, pink and bare,
Daring me gently: Come over if you dare.

I loved you quickly, claimed you like treasure,
Cradled you close, imagined your pleasure.
Slowly I drained you, my flickering confessor
You grew smaller, lighter my smoky transgressor.
You gifted me fire, a quiet, steady glow,
And taught me what it means to be a little lighter,
with room to grow.

I don’t know who hurt you,
but I can see the bruise behind your words.
They pulse like warning lights
and I want to understand,
even if you never let me close.

You speak of venom,
but I wonder
is it pain just trying to escape,
clumsy and loud
like a child crying in a language no one taught them?

Maybe I was softened,
not by privilege,
but by hope
the kind that still believes
people are more than the worst things they've done.

You call me a mask,
a hollow, a ruin
but ruins still hold echoes,
don’t they?
A kind of beauty in what's left standing.

If I’ve hurt you,
know it wasn’t my aim.
I never meant to twist anything.
I just wanted to be seen
the way sunlight sees through leaves
not perfectly, but honestly.

You don’t owe me sympathy,
and I won’t ask for your guilt.
But maybe, just maybe
we’re both stumbling
through different kinds of wreckage,
and neither of us knows how to build
without bleeding.

Who beat you?
Who broke you?
Did they shape you into this ruin of a person?
Were they reckless enough to hand you a voice?
As you dare to stand obstinate to the will of the world,
How did you manage to infect my day with your venom?
Has privilege soften you?
Or did you silently rot from the inside out?

You claim you're shattered,
That you're some relic of trauma
But the way you wield cruelty reveals the lie.
Your pain isn’t penance; it’s projection.
You speak fluent madness.
You manufacture grief
And parade it like some kind of twisted triumph.
You twist the words of the kind
Into scaffolding for your false self
A mask for the void where your soul should be.

Should I feel remorse?
Guilt? Regret?
I’d offer sympathy,
But there’s a chasm between empathy and letting someone
erase me
to validate the wreckage they’ve become.

Life is a cruel, cold,
and broken place
and still,
we are told to find ourselves within it.

But if you are not cruel,
not cold,
not broken
then what are you?

An oddity,
a rare bloom in frozen soil,
a strange and delicate thing
the world forgot how to make.

Not shaped from this earth,
but carved from some softer realm,
where kindness
is not a casualty,
but a calling.

And maybe
what makes you beautiful
is not just what you are,
but how impossible
you seem
in a world like this.

When I lie beside her,
my mind still drifts to you
a whisper in the dark,
a question I can't silence.

Your scent,
a ghost I chase in every room.
Your beauty
etched into me like scripture,
unfading,
unforgiving.

You unlock something in me
my pen bleeds truth
when you haunt my thoughts.
I write bare,
unarmored,
because of you.

No one else
makes me tremble
the way you do.

Sometimes,
the ache of missing you
burns into motion
I dream of my motorcycle
cutting through the salt air,
hugging the cliffs
from LA to Oregon,
just to collapse into the fire
we once called love.

But love like ours
is a wound,
and I wear the pain
like a patchwork of tears and scars,
empty and spent
but never free.