I met the love of my life at a needle tip, I fell for her as soon as I discovered her exquisite beauty that ran skin-deep, leaving shivers down my spine when I first felt her warmth, coursing through my veins.

I met the love of my life in a dark alley-way, where most folk around these ends dare not go, through forgotten pathways abandoned by the men in uniform with shiny badges but no stranger to other men who were on the run and just wanted to make a quick buck at every twist and turn.

Even the darkest corners of this dull city appeared to be animated and took my breath away with her wrapped around my arm and by my side, she was my anchor and kept me warm on those cold, lonesome nights.

She became everything to me and more, she was the heaven that I went to hell for, dominating our relationship and yet I loved her unconditionally, too much of a fool to see what she was doing to me from the side-line.

She no longer came to visit or show up at their door because my family and friends hated her, they kept telling me that she was no good for me with clenched fists and tears filling their eyes but her voice drowned out the sound of theirs, soft, warm and loving just like how she made me feel, until I put her above them.

The concept of time dissolved when I met the love of my life, my vice.

She had already witnessed an entire lifetime pass her by as a speck of dust, believing that she’d been buried when the wrong people saw past her and walked away.

Little did she know, although she was small and insignificant to some, as she rose from the ground in which she settled upon, she realized she wasn’t just the dirt at her feet but a seed, waiting to be planted.

That she had been wallowing for far too long, allowing the absences of others to define her but never seeing the importance of her presence in the moment.

She wasn’t important because he had told her that she wouldn’t blossom, she was disregarded when she was too much, too difficult and too broken and yet here she is, digging up her own grave and planting herself again.

I’ll always be the poet but never the muse and very rarely is there an inkling for anybody to wonder about me as I splash ink across blank pages, amid the sheer chaos of sorrow and tranquil solitude.

For somebody to feel each character, pulsing through their veins, losing their breath as I run through their minds with heavy hands and fingers that twitch in the same way that mine do.

With emotions like an ocean that I can no longer mute or the sharp edge on the tip of my tongue that bleeds every last syllable that echoes silently, the ball-point tip that illustrates each pronunciation that slices through paper like a blade.

Nobody has ever twisted my name between metaphors in the same slight manner that I do theirs or felt the lyrics to a love song coursing through their body. I’m never the topic of choice but rather the broken genius behind hidden artifacts. Always the antagonist but never quite the protagonist.

She who shall not be named, the unmentionable mystery that crafts paragraphs from concepts, the storyteller but never the topic, building herself upon beginnings and endings.

I’ll always be the poet but never the muse, pouring out my guarded heart and offering a glass to whoever will listen.