Free Verse Poem
I don’t regret meeting people-
I love the souls behind their eyes,
the hidden galaxies,
the fragile sparks that keep them human.
But yours…. they haunt me.
They are hollow,
a mask without mercy,
an emptiness where love should have lived.
No spirit dares reside
in a vessel of darkness,
of hate,
of abuse.
You were a body carrying ruin,
a mouth that preached tenderness,
but hands that only knew how to take.
I wish I could step back in time-
close the door before it ever opened,
refuse the lie of safety
you wrapped around me.
Maybe I could have saved myself,
kept my body mine,
my heart mine,
before you reached into me
and hollowed me into silence.
Maybe today I would be free-
not flinching at touch,
not tracing every scar
in the dark of my mind.
Maybe I’d smile without fracture,
laugh without breaking,
carry light in my eyes
instead of the shadows you planted there.
I imagine the girl I could have been-
how her joy might have bloomed,
how she might have trusted
without trembling,
loved without fear of being split open.
Instead, I stand as a ruin:
a shell of a woman,
performing her part
in a flawless facade.
I speak the lines.
I play the role.
So no one hears the hollow echo
between my ribs.
I wonder who I might have been without you-
someone who left the doors unbolted,
who let people enter
without terror in her chest.
Now I lock every entrance,
fortify every wall,
as if love itself were a knife
waiting for my throat.
You live inside my memory like a stain,
unwanted,
unyielding,
and I am left to scrub at the corruption
that will not lift.
And yet-
beneath the ruin,
beneath the ash of what you burned-
a voice still whispers:
I am not only what you made of me.
One day,
I will crawl from this husk,
shed your shadow like dead skin,
and learn to live
in a body that is mine again.
The Altar 