Like a candle that still burns,
wax falling slow like tears,
its trembling flame returns
to the darkness it fears.

Like a fire losing breath,
its smoke the only song—
a sigh, a cry, a death,
a fear that lingers long.

Like water in my hands,
it glimmers, then it dies;
it slips through fragile strands,
a truth the night denies.

Like drowning in the deep,
where beauty fades away,
the waves embrace, they keep
what light cannot repay.

Like wheels that crush a wing,
blood staining stone with red—
a cruel remembering
of flight now cold and dead.

Like swans who drift alone,
their vows reduced to air,
a name once carved in stone
lies hollow, stripped, and bare.

And so remains the girl,
beneath the midnight sky;
her sorrow forms a whirl,
her silence learns to cry.

She drowns while gazing still,
at beauty life lets go—
to lose what was not hers,
yet love what fades below.

A phoenix — luminous, fervid, ignified with the flame of her hope.
To **** a phoenix is not to strike her down —
but to aim the bullet directly at the will that keeps her rising.
To destroy her is to take the flame she thrives in
and turn it into the fire that consumes her.
To **** a phoenix is to corrupt her understanding of that flame —
to make her doubt the very thing that is her identity.
It is not the flame that truly brings her to defeat —
but the knife of meaning others twist within it.
Teach the phoenix — teach her young,
for the best results, they like to say.
Teach her that pain is proof of failure.
That the heat of her own flame is danger.
That to fall while reaching is shame,
and that to burn is weakness, not growth.
They do not warn her — they redefine her fire.
And so she learns to fear her own light,
while others smile at the success of their undoing.
They carve lies into her spine:
That to rise is expected,
but to falter — even once — is disgrace,
and to become unworthy of ever having wings.
They praised her brilliance,
then twisted it into a new definition: perfection, or nothing at all.
A cruel form of violence:
to make one’s essence conditional,
to hold admiration like a gun to her head,
and call the threat an act of love.
And once the phoenix is dead —
she was never really born.
Not in their eyes.
She had the potential
to carry the undying, luminous flame of a phoenix,
but they watched her lose it
and called her a disappointment.
But it was not her failure.
She was a child.
What did she know of fire?
She was taught to fear it.

What they mistook for nurture was the slow architecture of ruin — and still, they smiled as the ashes fell.

A cockroach — grotesque figure.
Lurid. Spindly legs.
Appalling. Feared by many.

To **** this filthy thing is, to most, an act of mercy.
You crush it, and they applaud.
Thus are you named savior — though it was only your comfort you served.

If the same were done to a butterfly —
delicate thing of silk and light,
its wings praised like stained glass in motion —
its death would birth mourning.

And you —
you would be called a villain.

But when you crush the cockroach,
black-bodied, oil-slick, crawling through shadow,
the world does not flinch.

They applaud you.
Call it clean.

One dies in a pool of sorrow.
The other dies in silence.

And still, both only sought the same thing — life.

One spoke in beauty.
The other in ugliness.

But neither asked to be born.
Neither chose their shape.

See the difference?

You **** what offends your eye,
and call yourself righteous.

One death earns flowers.
The other earns nothing.

Perhaps this is the story:
That mercy is given to the pretty,
and the ugly are buried without names.

It does not bite.
It does not chase.
It only exists —
and for that, you spill its blood.

Who, then, is the beast?

Perfect—an absurd word.

By definition: without flaw, without defect.
But tell me—
who decides what is flaw?
Who dares to declare a thing complete
in a world forever undone?

Perfect is illusion wrapped in grace,
a silk veil drawn over something still breathing.
It speaks of endings
in a life that has only ever known motion.
A silence interrupting a symphony
still reaching for its final note.

To call something perfect
is to deny it permission to change—
to praise it into stillness.
It is not reverence,
but a soft undoing:
the kind that freezes a moment
so it may never become more.

Perfection, in its most elegant deceit,
is not truth.
It is a mirror too smooth
for anything real to hold.