Langhai

I ain’t chasing crowns or chaos

I’m chasing quiet that still hums in the bones,

the kind of peace you gotta earn

after you’ve tasted every kind of noise.

I been running laps in my head,

balancing hunger against healing,

between saying less and meaning more

Truth is, I don’t wanna be famous,

I just want my art to look me in the eyes

and tell me it’s proud of how I survived,

& created my pikin self for inside.

Every “almost” trained my heart to wait like a loaded gun,

Every name I can't forget is a language I never learn to speak.

She once said my calm scared her

I told her peace look so foreign when you addicted to chaos

Her laugh still lives on my tongue

like the aftertaste of what I should’ve said.

Sometimes I sit still, feel the world breathe so heavily,

and I wonder if I’m too gentle for the noise,

or too stubborn for the tranquility

In every damn time I swallowed what I wanted to say

‘cause peace looked sexier than honesty.

My words still bleed warmth,

lowkey, they flirt with pain like it’s the only thing that listens.

If you peel me open, you’ll find no sermon, no pity,

just lessons folded inside love,

just pressure making a poet out of a boy who never begged to be heard

All I ever wanted was one breath,

One breath

One breath

not to own it, but to fill it

with something honest enough to outlive me.

That kind of pain hums smooth,

like sweat on dark skin in July heat.

It’s not heartbreak but reminder,

That softness always charges interest.

Why do I still ache for him,

like a body thirsting for water

even as the well is poisoned?

Why do my lips rehearse

the prayer of his name,

though every syllable is a knife

that remembers my blood?

I loved him

the way a fever loves the dying—

with heat, with trembling,

with the certainty of collapse.

He became my contagion,

an infection I carried proudly,

as if decay itself were holy.

His cruelty was not blunt,

but precise—

a surgeon’s scalpel

opening me inch by inch,

until I was nothing

but a specimen on his table,

a heart pinned and twitching,

begging to be studied,

not saved.

And yet—

I want him.

Still.

Still, I want his mouth,

that abyss where lies curled like smoke.

Still, I want his hands,

those architects of destruction,

to trace the geography of my skin

as though I were ruins worth rebuilding.

What insanity is this,

to worship a tormentor?

To crave the chains

that leave my wrists bloodied,

as though shackles could be ornaments

and prisons, palaces?

If love is a miracle,

then ours was a grotesque one:

a resurrection of pain,

a sanctification of grief.

And I—

willing martyr that I am—

offered myself

again and again

to the altar of his absence.

Even now,

in the quiet of my solitude,

I dream of him as if he were salvation—

though I know he is nothing

but a beautifully sharpened blade.

And still I press my throat to him.

And still I whisper:

take me, cut me, keep me—

for I have forgotten

how to exist

without the exquisite horror

of his love…

•SL🦋