The Tea That Poisoned the Poet

The Tea That Poisoned the Poet

The cup was waiting, still as a held breath,

resting on pages that whispered in ink,

a quiet invitation dressed in warmth,

a comfort shaped like memory and habit.

He lifted it slow, as if time could bruise,

as if the liquid might speak before entering,

steam curling like secrets above the rim,

a language he almost understood too late.

There was a bitterness beneath the calm,

a note that lingered longer than it should,

not sharp enough to startle the tongue,

but patient, and certain, and cruel in its quiet.

The room did not change, yet something shifted,

the walls leaned closer without moving at all,

each word on the page began to tremble,

as though the story refused to be finished.

His hands, once steady with crafted lines,

forgot the rhythm they had always known,

fingers stiff with an unseen winter,

ink drying inside the veins of thought.

He tried to write, to anchor himself,

to carve one truth before the silence came,

but language slipped like sand through his grasp,

each sentence collapsing before it could breathe.

The poison was not loud, nor wild, nor cruel,

it worked like doubt, like a slow unmaking,

turning certainty into a distant echo,

and meaning into something hollow and thin.

He saw then, in the stillness of ending,

that the cup had always known his name,

that every sip had been a quiet agreement,

signed in the loneliness he never confessed.

The final line never found its page,

it lingered instead in the air he could not hold,

a thought unfinished, a voice undone,

a poet erased by his own last comfort.

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