The Man Who Counted My Scars Poem by Martins Akhoeneto

He came with oil, not water,
To feed old flames that never warmed my home.
Behind my back he built a courthouse;
Before my face he wore a friend's name.

He measured my life with another man's ruler,
Called silence guilt, restraint a crime.
He priced my love in gifts unbought,
As though hearts were sold by the hour.

He unearthed an eleven-year skeleton,
Polished its bones, and named it truth.
Yet no witness knows the ache of the shoe
Except the foot that bled inside it.

I smiled—
Not because his arrows missed,
But because laughter is the last shield
Of a heart too weary for war.

Yesterday I buried no friendship;
I merely found its grave.
For twenty-four years I shook a shadow,
Thinking it was a man.