You wore nobility like perfume-
heavy, intentional, meant to linger
after you had already left the room.

Beauty, arranged.
Duty, performed.
Desire, indulged without restraint.

Tell me-
how many cradles cooled in your absence?
How many small fists opened
to find no finger offered back?

We were not tragedies to you.
We were inconveniences.
Consequences tidied away
like dust from a marble floor.

How many are there?
Do you know?
Can you count them as easily
as you counted your lovers?

Say their names.

No-
you cannot.

You never learned the weight of them.
Never traced them into memory.
Never let them root beneath your tongue.

Streetborn, alley-shaped, unacknowledged-
we grew in the cracks of your omission.
We fed on what you withheld.
We made marrow of neglect.

You call that survival.
I call it indictment.

Somewhere, perhaps,
another child of yours is waking
to the slow realization
that they were never meant to be kept.

How many more must learn
that origin is not the same as mother?

Listen carefully.

Every one you cast aside
becomes mine.

I will gather them-
the half-remembered,
the unrecorded,
the living proofs of your appetite.

I will learn their names.
I will hold their faces in both hands
and make them feel chosen.

I will adore them
with a ferocity you never possessed.

You made us consequences.

We will make ourselves legacy.

Penned by my hand on Gosday, the 22nd of Ios, in the year 17 AC.