Taken

The night wore a friendly face
when it crossed my threshold~ 
boots quiet upon the floorboards
of the only place I called safe.
My house knew his name.
My walls had listened to laughter
that once meant trust.
But treachery does not always arrive
with thunder.
Sometimes it is dust
on the rim of a glass or on a breath ~  a bitter ghost dissolving
into the bloodstream of belief.
The breath of the devil
crept soft through my veins,
a fog uncoiling behind the eyes
where thought once stood guard.
Then the world tilted.
Language dissolved.
Gravity thickened like tar.
My limbs became strangers
too heavy to answer my will.
And somewhere in the dimming room
a sacred word was stolen.
Consent.
Such a small word
I felt it torn away~
not loudly,
not with ceremony~
but like a lock quietly broken
in the deepest chamber of the soul.
Fear bloomed there first.
A cold, crawling terror
that skittered through bone
like rats in the hollow walls of a crypt.
My body knew danger
long before my voice could rise.
And inside~
Gods.
Inside it felt like fire.
Not the bright flame of a hearth
but a crueler burning~
a slow, devouring heat
as though my ribs had been filled
with molten glass.
My insides screamed
without sound.
The soul has nerves,
though no physician can chart them.
And mine were ablaze.
Time shattered.
Minutes fell like broken teeth
into a black well of forgetting,
while somewhere in that darkness
the shape of betrayal leaned close.
Not a monster.
Worse.
A man wearing the familiar skin
of someone I once trusted.
The body remembers
what the mind cannot bear to hold~
the suffocating weight of fear,
the helpless gravity of stolen choice,
the terrible knowledge
that “no” has no voice
when poison grips the tongue.
I thought I would die there.
Not the quiet death of breath~
but the deeper death.
The one where the self fractures
and sinks beneath the wreckage
of what was taken.
Yet dawn is a stubborn creature.
It crawls through cracks
even in ruined houses.
Morning found me broken, yes~
a cathedral collapsed inward,
stone and prayer scattered
across a trembling floor.
But beneath the rubble
something breathed.
A ragged pulse.
A fragile defiance.
A heart that refused the grave.
The pain did not vanish.
Fear did not evaporate.
The fire within my bones
still remembers that night.
But hear me ~
hear this clearly.
The theft of consent
did not steal my existence.
The burning did not consume my soul.
I rose from that inferno
scarred, shaking, unfinished~
yet living.
And the living
are far more powerful
than the monsters who hide in poison and lies.
For they must drug the world
to take what we would never give.
But I remain.
Breathing.
Speaking.
Surviving.
And every word I write
is another match struck
against the dark that tried to consume me. 🖤