C'wrinkle'd

In me bred happiness…
Joy and glee entwined their fingers…
Revolved in my insides…

Causing goosebumps…
Eliciting a smile…
A toothy smile was mine…
As a brightly-lit rhizome…

Making insignificant creases…
At the edge of my brown eyes…
Furrows of grin…
Crinkles of bliss…

An inexplicable contentment…
That awakened me at dawn…
And sang me asleep in the dark…

For the prophecy hadn’t been said yet…
Toxic words that he said…
A silent hope mouthed…
Struck a deal with my fate…

To happen to me as has happened to others…

And I…
So unaware of his animosity…
So unbelieving of his flaws…
In a delusion of a dotard…
Falling in the quashing palms…
Of fate and of his…

Sitting so oblivious…
Reclining between the palms…
Blinded to an actuality…
That I only functioned…
As a body not a soul…

And then gnawingly and gradually…
The fingers began to close in…
Fisted me in its murk…
Squashed my every essence…
Snipped my every smile…

And then the last move…
To mangle every hope…
And wring out every faith…
Poured over me…
A stream of filth…
A nauseating statement…


And the creases ironed out…
No elation expressed…
The crinkles shifted homes…
From the rim of my eyelids…
To the plane of my forehead…

And if I were to show age soon…
I would rather be furrowed when I smiled…
Than be ironed out into a dispirited flatness…

For I am not a mask…
I am also human…
I do not come with an expiry date…
I am not the “best before 2005” product…

I would also indulge in uninhibited laughter…
That he stole from me…
And now in his yarns of humour…
Distributes it to the world…

And never would he return to me…
What he snatched so callously…
And he will live in joy…
And trash from his memory…
What a misery he unknowingly brought…
And flattened my crinkles…
To gift me with wrinkles.