🧛‍♀️

The Vampire With A Painted Face

Her face is a locked door,
the kind that creaks in empty hallways,
paint peeling like a scab.
Her lips, stitched shut with shadows,
hold no warmth—only the promise
of a cold draught when they part.

Anger drips from her like leaky pipes,
pooling under her feet,
smearing the floorboards of every room she haunts.
She chews on my kindness
like stale bread, spitting out crumbs
with a laugh sharp as broken mirrors.

Her words are fangs,
sunken into the jugular of my patience.
Even when I give her roses,
she crushes the petals underfoot
and tells me the thorns were sharper
than her expectations.

She walks like a storm cloud,
her shadow long and damp,
staining my day like spilled blood.
The air curdles around her,
and even the birds forget to sing.

I hand her joy,
wrapped in ribbons of goodwill,
but she pulls the threads loose,
unravelling my efforts into tangled knots.
Her thanks? A grimace,
a scoff made of cold ashes.

Her laughter, when it comes,
is a raven’s call in a dead forest—
jagged and echoing,
feeding on what little life remains.
My hatred is the oil in her lantern,
burning low and endless.

She takes my silence
and moulds it into complaints,
her voice a draught through cracked windows,
always finding a way in.
Even when there’s nothing left to break,
she presses her hands against the walls,
listening for the cracks to widen.

And when I dream of her demise,
whispering curses into the night,
she wears my hate
like a funeral veil,
smiling—not with her lips,
but with the hollow,
endless ache of her presence.

She stands tall, gloating,
her smirk carved like gargoyle stone,
head held high as though the weight of disdain
only polishes her crown.
She looks at me like I am the dirt
she refuses to scrape from her boots,
like I am the rust
on the lock of her unyielding scowl.

And you would hate her, too,
if you met her.
You would despise the way her shadow
stretches longer than her frame,
the way her disdain curdles the air
into something thick and choking.

Or maybe you wouldn’t.
Maybe you’d hate me more,
for telling you this story.
For dragging her image into your mind,
for pressing her sneer into your dreams.
Because at least she has the audacity
to hold her head high,
to bask in the wreckage she creates.

But I?
I just bring her to you,
Complain about her through a poem in first person,
so that makes me worse.
Doesn’t it?