Nihilated from naivety, only you
could prove despair isn’t the only truth,
and remedy everything that cheapened me.

Every empty fill of vacuous desire
ebbed away sentimentality
until idealism was an affliction,
a coerced condition.

Stripped of venom as armour
reposed in your words,
romanticism is no longer an abject territory.

You’re the memory
I silently ached to make;
the expectation too unrealistic to hold
until your arms became the sanctuary
I could deconstruct my defences for.