Not a Single Heart Left.
Two hearts falling in love are like gamblers at a table,
rolling the dice, pretending the game is fun
right up until there’s a winner and a loser.
But when you gamble hearts and not dice,
everyone loses
especially the one who thinks he's won.
You were the sweetest illusion.
An expert dealer
with smooth hands,
the right words,
your life staged like a gallery of flattering frames
eyes broken like jars full of golden water,
all the aesthetics that spark nostalgia.
You dealt dice,
you took my heart,
and traded it away for a price
so small, so silent, like it meant nothing.
My ribs still remember where you hit.
Walking away meant profit.
But I’ve seen it before
debts of the heart collect interest in silence.
The hungry always come back to the table
Maybe you’ll never see my bill come due
but you’ll return to that same table,
hungry,
with somebody new,
their heart in your hands,
trying to collect another win.
And when the years stack like cards,
when you’ve run out of hearts to gamble,
you go home,
you’ll search through your old wins,
down in your mother’s grave,
you hid every soft thing she never gave you
in the same dirt that took her
you’ll dig for every souvenir of love
you buried there.
You’ll find them
rotted,
unused,
worthless,
because you never spent them on anything real.
I hope then you remember.
You rolled my heart like a die
made of luck and ego.
And here’s the quiet truth you never saw:
my heart is bigger than an ego,
more precious than the luck.
My ribs eventually healed.
I still have it.
What you gambled wasn’t my heart
it was a version of me that loved you
you gambled my love of you.
You’ll walk through your house,
an old man now,
your eyes tracing the cracked walls
lined with frames
all of them empty
yet still holding the ghosts of the people
who could have been there for you.
You sold them out.
you’ll realize every heart that loved you
slipped through your fingers.
A man who gambled every heart but his own
is left with not a single heart to love him back.
