A broken mirror.

A broken mirror.

I came to you to find the glass,
To hold the pieces of the shards,
To see the truth of what had passed,
Stripped of the weight of playing cards.
You were the mirror, polished, clear,
So I could face the ghost I kept,
To map the geography of my fear,
And name the shadows while I wept.

But you were cracked or set askew,
A surface bent to warp the light.
I looked for me, but found, in you,
The echo of a gaslit night.
The years of ruin, the weight of hands
That left their bruising, jagged toll—
You held the map of broken lands,
Then burned the parchment for my soul.

"It was your choice," the verdict fell,
A surgical, cold-blooded sting.
You took the stories I would tell
And clipped the feathers from the wing.
You mirrored back the very blame
That draped me in a shroud of shame,
Turning the victim to the source—
A cruelty, practiced, as a course.

So why the horror in the chest?
Why does the air grow thin and strange?
When those who claim to heal the rest
Are masters of the cold exchange.
They promise sight, they offer grace,
But keep the blame within their sleeves;
They hold a mirror to my face
And paint it with the blood of thieves.

I came to heal; I came to mend,
To parse the logic of the lie,
But found that even there, the trend
Was watching my own spirit die.
You were the glass I trusted most—
To clear the fog, to ease the pain—
But all you did was feed the ghost,
And wash me in the blame again.