It Wasn't Love

It wasn't love,

only a mirage trembling

on the heated horizon of your hope.

A cathedral of whispers

built from borrowed tenderness,

hollow beneath its stained-glass vows.

He did not love you.

He loved dominion.

The quiet thrill of fastening

golden chains around a breathing soul

and naming them devotion.

His affection was architecture,

carefully engineered corridors

always leading back to him.

Every compliment, a velvet tether.

Every promise, a silken snare.

But you,

You were fluent in the language of fractures.

You heard the tremor beneath his sweetness,

saw the arithmetic behind his embrace,

felt the cold machinery turning

behind warm hands.

When you refused him,

It was not thunder,

It was laughter.

A light, dismissive wind

that scattered the empire

he had already crowned himself king of.

He had imagined you pliant,

a marionette carved from longing,

your wrists soft for his invisible threads.

Instead, you became the blade.

You severed the strings

without ceremony.

And that,

That was the wound.

Not rejection,

But revelation.

Not anger,

but exposure.

Now he gathers shame

and fashions it into an accusation,

lays it at your feet

as if guilt were a bouquet

You ought to cradle.

He will not bow.

Cruel men seldom kneel

before the women they fail to conquer.

But hear this:

You did not abandon love.

You dismantled the illusion.

The ache he carries

is not heartbreak,

It is the echo

of a throne collapsing

inside his chest.