Jaanuu
Favoured Frenzy
The evening chai smells like a familiar poison,
a slow venom I have swallowed for months,
pretending it warms me while it hollows me out.
Each sip feels like a quiet suicide
performed not out of courage
but out of the weary exhibition
of the turmoil I no longer know how to hide.
The same anxiety that tears me awake at dawn
has learned to cradle me to sleep at night,
like a cruel nurse humming lullabies
over a fever she refuses to cure.
And my heart, fractured in places
I no longer remember being whole,
has begun to feed on its own wounds,
drinking the blood that leaks through its cracks
as if suffering were its only inheritance.
Still, I breathe the same air you breathe
maybe sharing your sky might save me,
as though proximity were love
and love were not the very poison
I once begged for in my thirst.
So I keep consuming it,
the sweetness that laced with quiet death,
and the tender ache I mistake for affection,
the poison I always wanted
because it reminded me
that once, I still believed in being loved.
~
a slow venom I have swallowed for months,
pretending it warms me while it hollows me out.
Each sip feels like a quiet suicide
performed not out of courage
but out of the weary exhibition
of the turmoil I no longer know how to hide.
The same anxiety that tears me awake at dawn
has learned to cradle me to sleep at night,
like a cruel nurse humming lullabies
over a fever she refuses to cure.
And my heart, fractured in places
I no longer remember being whole,
has begun to feed on its own wounds,
drinking the blood that leaks through its cracks
as if suffering were its only inheritance.
Still, I breathe the same air you breathe
maybe sharing your sky might save me,
as though proximity were love
and love were not the very poison
I once begged for in my thirst.
So I keep consuming it,
the sweetness that laced with quiet death,
and the tender ache I mistake for affection,
the poison I always wanted
because it reminded me
that once, I still believed in being loved.
~
