Devil’s Breath

The night did not batter my door~
it entered softly,
wearing the borrowed smile of a friend.
My hearth was warm, my walls were known to me,
the quiet house breathing trust
through timber and shadow.
He brought laughter like harmless wine,
a sweetness poured in fragile glass;
yet somewhere in that amber calm
a darker wind had learned my name~
the whisper of Devil’s Breath,
invisible as treachery in prayer.
It touched my lips like powdered dusk,
like ash from some forgotten pyre;
and soon the room grew deep with fog,
a drowning sea of wavering fire.
The floor leaned close, the walls withdrew,
my pulse became a distant bell~
a tolling far beneath the ribs
where waking thoughts once used to dwell.
O traitor night! O Judas breath!
What phantom poison dims the soul
until the body is but a ruin
where broken echoes lose control?
My limbs were marble dragged by chains,
my voice a bird with shattered wings;
the house I loved became a crypt
where silence fed on sacred things.
And there ~ within that poisoned haze ~
a mask slipped loose from borrowed grace:
no friend remained behind those eyes,
only the wolf that wore his face.
Darkness remembers what the body cannot~
a splintered reel of shadowed cries,
a soul retreating into caverns
where even memory denies.
The hours crawled like patient worms
beneath the coffin of my skin;
and somewhere deep the Devil laughed,
believing night would always win.
But listen~
listen well, O patient Dark~
For though you sealed my breath with dust
and left me shattered on the floor,
some stubborn ember in my chest
refused the grave you held in store.
Morning found me wreckage ~yes~
a cathedral cracked by thunder’s hand,
my spirit raw, my bones unsure
how any broken thing might stand.
Yet still I breathed.
And breathing ~ rose.
Not blazing like the vengeful sun,
nor raging fire that scorches skies—
but something quieter, stronger still:
a star that wakes in wounded eyes.
You thought the drug would steal my name,
that shame would chain my voice to night;
yet from the rubble of that hour
I learned a different kind of light.
I do not burn.
I shine.
A fractured lantern in the dark,
a stubborn gleam no breath can smother~
for I crawled from the Devil’s silence
and rose again,
my own fierce keeper.
Remember this, O treacherous night~
O poison whispered into trust:
The grave you carved became my threshold.
The ruin you made became my dawn. 🖤