Its So Hard To Believe Someone Could Love Me. Im Always Always Too Much Or Too Little. Never Enough.

“Until we have seen someone’s darkness, we don’t really know who they are. Until we have forgiven someone’s darkness, we don’t really know what love is.”

— Marianne Williamson

2 April, 1937 Letters to Véra by Vladimir Nabokov

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Ray Bradbury

“I wish I could say everything in one word. I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end.”

— Unknown

The child chews

an empty spoon,

as if it were a dagger

he must swallow

night after night,

until hunger forgets

his name.

-Cyrus K

I was birthed from the torn stomach of night,

drenched not in milk,

but in the black bile of forgotten prayers.

The world spat me out

as a creature too ruined to be loved,

a wound with legs,

a scream with teeth.

Hope;

was a bone thrown to a starving dog.

I gnawed it until my mouth filled with splinters,

bled until my tongue knew only the taste

of broken promises.

I grew eating hunger,

drinking the venom of people's hate,

wearing the bruises of their disgust

like a second, rotting skin.

The colour of my flesh...

an open invitation to cruelty,

a crime I could never peel from my bones.

And when I crawled through the sewage of my years,

a thing barely breathing,

I thought love would be the knife to cut me free.

Instead,

it was another dagger...

this one twisted slowly into my throat

while I watched her eyes,

soft and shining,

for someone else.

Tell me, God,

what is more merciful:

to be born blind to love,

or to be shown its light

only to have it ripped from your hands

by fingers colder than the grave?

If there is a God of agony,

He carved His name into my ribs with rusted nails,

He strung my tendons into a lyre

so He could pluck songs of suffering

from my every step.

At night, I lie rotting,

a feast for the worms of memory,

as my dreams decompose around me,

the stench of what might have been,

thick enough to choke a corpse.

I feel decay threading through my blood,

I hear my hope

crackling like dry leaves under the boots

of things that never loved me.

My soul,

no, not even a soul,

a shattered lantern,

spilling its last flicker into a pit

where even maggots refuse to crawl.

And still,

some putrid, twitching part of me

reaches out,

fingers broken and blackened,

begging the silent stars

for something,

anything,

that does not end

in rot.

-Cyrus K.

“Real tears are not those that fall from the eyes and cover the face, but those that fall from the heart and cover the soul.”

— Unknown

Fin

No more love No more poems No more hearts No more souls

No more sticks No more stones No more splints No more bones

No more bricks No more walls No more mines No more yours

No more tears No more loss No more fears No more gods

No more graves No more rows No more wars No more jokes

No more needs No more wants No more sex No more cunts

No more slack No more ropes No more deaths No more ghosts

No more breaths No more goals No more dreams No more hope

No more sleep No more thoughts No more thoughts No more thoughts

Embrace the dark Till the new day's begun There's always the dawn Always the sun

--- 30-4-2025, M.A. Tempels © Napowrimo 30: Always the sun

She believes she knows my ache,

she thinks she understands my sorrow,

because once, she too was broken.

My pain is

a slow implosion,

a daily funeral

with no mourners,

a storm I must swallow

so she may walk beneath clear skies.

She remains with another,

while I cradle her chaos in the dark,

I try hold her world steady,

bleeding in silence,

so she never sees the stain.

Quietly tearing at the seams

just to keep her whole.

I laugh when I want to scream.

I smile so she can cry.

I disappear so she can shine.

And each day,

I wake inside a coffin

just to hold her hand.

This doesn't feel like love.

This is a man burning

so she may feel warm,

and never knowing

that the smoke

is me.

-Cyrus K.