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“The Apology That Never Left My Mouth” There are words the body remembers even when the tongue refuses them. Mine sat at the back of my throat like a house guest too ashamed to sleep, fully dressed in truth, waiting for courage that never arrived. I was not searching for forgiveness. I only wanted the weight to stop behaving like a second heartbeat. You would think silence is empty, but silence is one of the heaviest things a human being can carry. Especially when it is crowded with sentences that almost lived. I remember how my jaw tightened around every syllable. How my chest became a locked room where honesty paced in circles until exhaustion taught it stillness. The apology was complete. Every word polished. Every truth awake. It reached my teeth and found them closed like frightened gates. So I swallowed it. And people never speak enough about the physicality of restraint how the throat aches afterward, how the body punishes itself for becoming a graveyard to something living. Since then, I have understood that some truths do not disappear when unsaid. They simply change form. Some become distance. Some become insomnia. Some become the quiet habit of staring at ceilings as if they might open and finish the sentence for you 26/05/26 Ghana 🇬🇭
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May 26
May 26, 2026 at 5:12 AM UTC
The Apology That Never Left My Mouth By: Martin Listowell Hanson
Took a bite out of life—milk teeth learning strength, still suckling at mother nature’s chest; love came easy… so did breathing. Now the mind resets—or pretends to; my present feels pre-set, slipping each step; till I slip into prayer—trying doors with keys that wouldn’t fit. Knowledge is key… but which way do you turn when the map has no key? Keynote— I shed skin like clothing, kicked off the day like work shoes; once a shy boy in shorts, now less shy to come out in short supply. Like Jacob in the night, I grapple with God—limping out of prayers, still asking for a name, a blessing, a reason I still ache. Known by few, seen by fewer— lonely in love; still willing to love the lonely. If only a storm would come, bringing high waves, washing me over as I wave goodbye to love… Till time unending— we say bye to what passes us by.
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Mar 17
Mar 17, 2026 at 3:50 PM UTC
PRE-SET PRAYERS // LOST KEYS
My breath belongs in my lungs, but my chest found a home inside your heart— then I cut pieces off myself just to hold a piece of you. Every embrace feels like a crowded room: your tight mannerisms wrapped around that pretty smile, your colours shifting between words; shapes changing into the version longing keeps sculpting. Maybe I’m the well dug too deep— a spiritual mirror of the man I keep trying to be, the one who could lie beside you in peace, long enough to remember what softness feels like. Your lips meet mine so gently that the moment breathes through both our pores; your presence pulls and pushes at once—push me away, and somehow your pull grows stronger. I fall back into that familiar gravity. You speak, and I listen through the seven levels of understanding; I try to translate us through the five love languages, into the three words you hesitate to confess, toward the one truth we both circle around. And all along, it only takes two— _You and I_, to subtract the whole count down to its core: I guess love is always the equation reduced to the simplest form.
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Dec 6, 2025
Dec 6, 2025 at 8:56 AM UTC
The Sum of Two
Baby, if my clock had scars, every waking tick would cut me open again, tiny wounds stitched into the seconds, as if time itself learned how to bruise me. Swore I was right, but please prove me wrong: if I were to die too young, how long would you hold on and cry? When these flies keep me up, circling like thoughts over the grave where I bury my sleep. I toss around in that dirt of old mistakes; I can’t find rest, but shame always finds its place beside me like a shadow waiting for a sunset. Our lives have begun, and all we'll borrow is a tomorrow; a loan from the universe we can’t afford to miss. Yet even tomorrow feels unguaranteed, a promise written in pencil on a clock face already smudged. But here I stand again on the threshold of my doom, listening to my heartbeat echo against all of the hours I wasted being afraid. I scroll past a million icons, but none of them belong to you— none of them stop the time the way you do when you look at me. Wiping regret smoke off my fingers, leaving marks like cigarette burns— small, circular reminders that love has its own way of branding you. Dreams, life, hope—they flicker under your eyes, and God, I found dreams, life & hope in your beautiful eyes. Baby, you met me as the sinner long before I remembered how to be the believer— and still, somehow, you warmed the cold future inside my chest. When our eyes met, time finally exhaled. I reached for your hand— not knowing whether I was reaching for comfort, or another collapse. Was it a lust for living again, or the fear of falling into a love that could remake me? Because the last time I loved, my clock cracked— its face carved with scars from every hour love betrayed me. I can feel the hands of time hesitate… as if they’re asking whether my heart can survive another touch, rather than keeping in touch with my regrets.
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Nov 25, 2025
Nov 25, 2025 at 4:58 AM UTC
Time Still Bleeds When I Love
Baby, if my clock had scars, every waking tick would cut me open again, tiny wounds stitched into the seconds, as if time itself learned how to bruise me. Swore I was right, but please prove me wrong: if I were to die too young, how long would you hold on and cry? When these flies keep me up, circling like thoughts over the grave where I bury my sleep. I toss around in that dirt of old mistakes; I can’t find rest, but shame always finds its place beside me like a shadow waiting for a sunset. Our lives have begun, and all we'll borrow is a tomorrow; a loan from the universe we can’t afford to miss. Yet even tomorrow feels unguaranteed, a promise written in pencil on a clock face already smudged. But here I stand again on the threshold of my doom, listening to my heartbeat echo against all of the hours I wasted being afraid. I scroll past a million icons, but none of them belong to you— none of them stop the time the way you do when you look at me. Wiping regret smoke off my fingers, leaving marks like cigarette burns— small, circular reminders that love has its own way of branding you. Dreams, life, hope—they flicker under your eyes, and God, I found dreams, life & hope in your beautiful eyes. Baby, you met me as the sinner long before I remembered how to be the believer— and still, somehow, you warmed the cold future inside my chest. When our eyes met, time finally exhaled. I reached for your hand— not knowing whether I was reaching for comfort, or another collapse. Was it a lust for living again, or the fear of falling into a love that could remake me? Because the last time I loved, my clock cracked— its face carved with scars from every hour love betrayed me. I can feel the hands of time hesitate… as if they’re asking whether my heart can survive another touch, rather than keeping in touch with my regrets.
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It's so hard to stomach these feelings — spilling out my guts, trying to find the guts to count all of the butterfly echoes in my stomach. I keep catching feelings with a net made of music notes; a song crying in my ears, humming the truth that I’m too afraid to speak. When I kissed her with my eyes closed, love blinded the unbeliever in me — the man who swore he’d never fall again; __yet he had fallen__. I placed my dreams in a small glass jar that she kept pressed to her chest — where our hopes slept like fireflies, _soft, glowing, fragile_; I treasured our love there, thinking the world couldn’t touch it. Your lips were that kind of kiss; the kind that drags you back to life, only to crush you, to break you, and reshape you into someone you barely recognize. And the stillness of night in a chaotic party was where I took my chance — swallowing my words, yet my lips were brave enough for both of us. Truth is, I couldn't fully stomach myself; never been good at lying, especially when fed on my own lies. And still, if all of this was just a beautifully crafted illusion, I can’t deny it — I savoured every sweet, aching part until even my stomach felt full.
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Nov 16, 2025
Nov 16, 2025 at 2:17 PM UTC
Full from What Emptied Me
Oh, blindness beauty — the cruelty of words unsaid, a prickly briar whispering _love in decline._ My card has been swiped twice; stolen from me are the dreams I charged on hope, and no point of sale could measure the worth of my soul. Oh, soul — how I wear sad forget-me-nots. My necktie is a tangle of knots, and I remember the vine from which every part of me was cut and shaped for loving someone. I will bear this crown of shame until I read perfected _loveliness,_ but how shameful that love is also a place of great loneliness. For wrapped around me is a honeysuckle — the kiss of a bee, sweet enough to forget the sting. And what was meant to guard my heart is also what threatens to **** me. I offered devotion with open palms, sprinting as a chasing heart across the miles of love’s marathon. I was breathless not because the chase was done but because I never caught what I was running toward. My eyes still run, chasing the taste of a pleasing sight; the palette of my mind stays hungry, my heart confused about where to begin. For in this kiss — what I hoped would last us years — was only a few more seconds before we parted from our words. For love is blind; we shut our eyes whenever we kiss. And truly the first one to open them is the one who has already begun to wonder whether this is worth it at all. Love is a blind beauty —_is it not_?
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Nov 14, 2025
Nov 14, 2025 at 8:32 AM UTC
The Kiss That Wonders
I made a decision— it lingers, enshrouding my mind; the crescent of burning delight pulls at tonight’s darkness, as a flicker of light, but also sliver of fright. My skin burns under its weight, while wisdom crowns me in sleep; I dreamt of it all— and still, I woke up uncertain. On the hot tarmac of my dreams I’m nothing but gravel, caught beneath the speed of passing lives. _Small. Unnoticed._ Wishing to be seen— but wishing is a two-edged lie; a blade that glitters hope yet cuts down to thought. There’s a verse written in every tear, a scripture memorized by sorrow, and the ocean inside me pours outward, salt and prayer, a flood no shore can contain. And still, somehow, I give birth to these shallow poems— though maybe shallow is just another way to say they carry depth beneath the surface. In the end, I return to the same place: the edge of decision, where all of it—a dream, a wish, or a word— is nothing, until I choose. And so I made a decision— a circle closing on itself, the beginning rewritten, the same words, but now carved deeper in stone.
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Oct 6, 2025
Oct 6, 2025 at 3:41 AM UTC
The Circle of Decision