You stuck a pin
through a butterfly,
yet promised she
deserved the best,
a slight stroke along her
delicate wings of velvet,
she was yours.
She was yours.
You said you loved her
eloquent hues,
lilac, ebony, and violet,
patterns you’d never before seen,
eyes like kaleidoscopes,
entrancing; a lost art of
fluttering within her own spirit.
You loved her eloquence.
You loved her.
She adored you in return,
one wing perched
within your flames,
you watched her velvet edges
smoulder to dust
in sick fascination
as she flailed frantic,
screaming beneath agony.
You tried to break her.
To break her.
You stuck a pin
through the butterfly’s heart
when she rose from ashes.
You bellowed how
if you couldn’t have her
then no one else ever would,
and when she crumbled,
you swept up the pieces
kept them in a jar.
You broke her.
You broke her.
Swore you’d get it right
when she sewed patches
upon wing threads.
Yet this time
you stomped her until
every bone crushed beneath you,
stabbing that pin
through her wings once more.
You screamed how you
deserve the best.
You deserve her best.
You deserve her.
(But you don’t.)
This time you’d get it right
you promised.
This time she was stoic
when she agreed
and when you turned back to
pin her back in place again
she was gone
in a cloud of dust
once her wings.
When the butterfly discovered
she could no longer fly
she crawled away instead.
She crawled away.
She crawled,
until she couldn’t come back,
pin still in her heart,
clambered on healing limbs.
She will never again
behold her eloquent hues
or spread those wings
to embrace another with
naïve innocence.
But this time when
she sews wings into patchwork
you won’t be there to
shred them.
Not this time.
She’ll rise in watercolours
of a new dawn
as though she
never knew you
at all.
Please check out the rest of this poetry collection, "Heart of Crushed Diamonds" over on Wattpad!
