I keep starving the love that asks to stay,
let it rot on my tongue like a sugarless prayer.
My hands, fluent in ruin, build walls from the bricks
of every "I’m fine" I never meant to say.

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My father fed his fears instead of his sons,
so I chew my own nails to the quick—
a sacrament of blood and split skin.
The body knows how to mourn what it’s never had.

Touch me, and I’ll flinch like a struck match.
My ribs cage a furnace that burns only when empty.
I rehearse goodbye in the shower each morning,
throat raw from swallowing the smoke of maybes.

Hope is a houseplant I drown between apologies,
its leaves wilting under the weight of my silence.
I text you at 3 a.m., delete every draft—
the cursor blinks back: *Coward. Liar. Ghost.*

Some nights, I dream of a door left open,
a version of me that doesn’t love like a wound.
But the heart is a museum of closed exhibits—
relics of light I’m too afraid to name.

So I salt the earth where the seeds could’ve grown.
Call it survival. Call it a funeral.
The ache in my chest writes its own epitaph:
*Here lies a woman who mistook her scars for shelter.*