You enter like riddles, all smirk and suggestion,
Unpacking your chaos in well-folded grace.
I pose like a thinker, then fail each confession,
Your presence turns logic to vapor and lace.
No lock ever halts your emotional session,
Just doors left ajar in a self-haunted space
You decorate silence with longing transitions
And find comfort you yearn for in wild heart embrace.
No permits are asked. You just climb and begin,
A vandal of stillness with restless intent.
Each heartbeat becomes your new patch to win,
Your lines bleed through dreams that were never well-meant.
I once thought of solitude as discipline
Now even my doubts wear your pigment and scent.
Tell me, what canvas survives content?
I tried to erase you with breath and revision,
But ink has a way of not asking to stay.
It leans into cracks, takes its own bold position,
Then whispers its name in a sunlight decay.
This isn’t romance—it’s quiet derision,
A mural of “maybe” in permanent grey
I flinch when you line my pallete and color disarray.
Your words write themselves in fluorescent distortion,
With arrows that point where I never have been.
You map out escape like a form of extortion,
Then grin while you scribble the exits back in.
I measure the cost in small acts of contortion,
In sleeping with memories dressed in my skin
Do you ever lose sweet rage condition.,
Or every conversation make you eager to win?
What makes you return with your metaphor army?
Each phrase is a soldier that conquers the night.
You charm like a riddle then turn into “harm me,”
Each vowel a grenade, each promise a slight.
You’ve ruined restraint with your soft origami
I fold into shapes that forgo what is right
And still, I await your next moments rewrite.
So here in this gallery hung in my chest,
You tag what you want, then move on unscathed.
But each mark you leave has outlived every guest,
And none of them asked to be saved.
I smile for the critics, I nod with the rest
But secretly wonder what’s left unengraved
And whether I’m built to live or be repaved.
06 August 2025
The Wall I Never Painted
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin