Poison — Kevin Tyrone McMillion Jr.

You are poison, though sweetly disguised, your venom carries the fragrance of spun sugar, a carnival sweetness masking decay. You arrive draped in radiance, an angel sculpted from borrowed light, yet beneath the shimmer coils a serpent whose skin glistens with promises already broken. You encircled my heart as if to shelter it, but the embrace was a noose disguised as warmth. Each breath became a negotiation, each moment of closeness another step down a staircase that never ended. Your fangs did not pierce suddenly— they hovered, delicate, ceremonial, dripping venom like a clock ticking above my head, a slow erasure written into my veins. The poison was not death, but an awakening into absurdity: that the lips which whispered to me belonged equally to another. I lay in your arms, not lifeless but multiplied, a body observing itself from the ceiling, a mind rehearsing excuses it never believed. Was it love, or a performance staged only for the cruel amusement of the crowd I could not see, but always felt? You—serpent, angel, deceiver— have left me wandering corridors that echo with your laughter. The venom lingers, not in my blood but in my sight: everything glows faintly with suspicion, every tenderness hides a blade. And yet— even knowing the venom, I find myself searching for the sweetness again, as if the poison were the only language I was ever meant to speak.