You Look Like Poetry

You look like poetry,

I once said —

and you laughed,

because you thought it was a compliment,

not a statutory warning.

You said I had a habit

of twisting words the wrong way

just to sound right.

I wish you were right, this time around.

I really do.

I wish loving you

didn’t bruise my ribs from the inside.

Didn’t feel like a punch

I consented to — sober —

and still flinched from later.

I wish poetry was only language.

I wish you weren’t poetry.

Because if you were prose,

I could underline you.

If you were logic,

I could argue you.

If you were law,

I could repeal you. 

But poetry has no due process.

And love, 

love is never apolitical.

It occupies.

It redraws borders.

It demands allegiance

while pretending it doesn’t.

You look like poetry, my love;

ancient as civilisation,

yet reinventing itself 

every time it ruins a man differently.

You look like poetry;

metaphors breathing without permission,

meanings mutating overnight,

syntax collapsing under the weight of desire.

Your eyes —

cyanide dressed as curiosity,

mischief pretending to be mercy.

A smile curved just enough

to make me believe

my undoing was my idea, to begin with.

You looked at me

like life wasn’t meant to be survived,

only spent recklessly

like invasion taught to speak softly

so it could pass as consent.

I tried to define you.

I really did. 

But poetry resists definition

the way fire resists ownership.

So I did what poets do

when they can’t control the subject:

I let you ruin me

and called it inspiration.

If you were a country,

you’d be at war with my spine.

If you were a religion,

I’d be the heretic

who still shows up every week.

You don’t break hearts.

You radicalise them.

And the worst part?

I’d still say it again.

You look like poetry, 

because loving you

felt important,

felt intelligent,

felt necessary…

even while it destroyed

every border

I had left.