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The Sentence You Never Served
Icarus
I offered my scars to your hands like an altar,
Letting you trace the ruin carved by those who never deserved to touch me,
Allowing you to feel what still lingers beneath my flesh after all it has endured.
I welcomed you into my safe space,
Where the fevered dark and restless chorus of memory remain,
Waiting to be heard like lost children begging for a voice.
You were sanctuary,
You were the quiet hymn beneath a blackened sky,
Something sacred I foolishly mistook for salvation.
But divinity rots just as easily,
And in a single breath you became the mouth of the void,
Swallowing every fragile piece of me that ever learned to trust your light.
Now they turn on me,
These wounds that once sang your name like a prayer,
Gnashing and spitting, cursing the mercy I ever gave you.
They remember how you held them,
How you soothed them into silence with such gentle care,
Only to tear them open again with the very same hands they learned to trust.
You were their heaven,
Their white-draped illusion of peace,
An Eden they believed they could finally rest within,
But instead you became a false god crowned in silk and softness,
Whispering promises you knew would never survive you,
Leading them gently toward a ruin they could never escape.
And I believed you,
God, I believed you,
Even as everything within me was being led to its undoing.
Now I am left with their voices,
Ragged, furious, and unrelenting within the confines of my mind,
A chorus of condemnation for the sin of ever loving you.
So I carry it with me,
The punishment,
The fracture,
The echo of everything you broke,
A sentence that should have been yours stitched deeply into me instead,
Bearing it until there is nothing left of me,
Until silence finally claims what remains.