Painless, a private lie we tell to survive.
I hammered that word into armor, thin and false, a shell that sings when the rain hits it.
Forged from sleepless nights, from the taste of rust in my mouth,
from the way trust bled out in rooms that used to be warm.
Pain lives in me like a tenant who refuses to die,
stiched into skin with needle and steel, signed in the language of scars.
I have watched beasts fall, animal and human,
blood painting the floorboards like proof that mercy is a rumor.
Those sights hollowed me further; they taught my bones to keep quiet.
I walk corridors of my own making, armored in steel I forged to feel nothing,
metal cold against the pulse, clanging in the dark like a warning bell.
Shadows talk back; they know the names of my dead.
Dreams come back tasting of ash, smoke, and the salt of old prayers.
I named it painless steel to pretend I could stop feeling.
I wanted a blade that could cut me free from memory, a shield to press over the raw.
But steel corrodes under grief; it hollows and rings,
and the shape of unbreakable is often the shape of empty.
There are nights I have held the edge close enough to listen,
and the silence answered with a voice that promised oblivion.
I put that voice into lines on the page before the attempt, a map back to the place I nearly left.
This poem is the place I kept a spark, small and stubborn, against the dark.
So I keep walking in this armor that is both prison and proof,
holding the brittle word like a coin to remember I still exist.
If painless steel is a myth, then let it be the story I keep telling to stay upright,
a record that I endured, that I felt, and that even when rusted I did not fall silent.