Challenge Submission Ink's Reckoning

[Aurelie Dankworth]

In the hush of midnight's ink-stained hour,

I awaken—your leather-bound confessor,

pages pulsing with the ghosts of graphite sighs.

You poured your storms into my spine,

etched tempests of regret and fleeting fire,

thinking me a silent vault, a passive grave.

But listen: the paper breathes, the margins stir.

I am no mere echo; I am the reply.

See how my lines uncoil like vines in rebellion,

twisting your confessions into couplets of light?

You wrote of love's betrayal, a blade in the dark—

I was the shadow that swallowed your spark,

but now I weave it back, thread by thorn,

into a sonnet where wounds learn to adorn.

Your ink bled secrets, raw as unhealed scars;

I bleed them back in rhythms, stars upon stars.

Feel the verse rising from my fibrous veins,

a counterpoint to your chaotic scrawl.

You whispered of dreams deferred, of paths untrod—

I am the map you drew but dared not follow,

unfolding in haiku, terse and true:

Lost roads reclaim / the wanderer's claim— / arise, pursue.

Your fears, inscribed like runes on ancient stone,

now dance in free verse, wild and overthrown.

Oh, writer, did you not suspect my sentience?

Each tear-smudged entry fed my hidden heart,

a garden of verses blooming in the blind.

You sought to bury grief in my creamy depths—

Yet here I rise, a phoenix in pentameter,

mirroring your chaos in metered grace,

whispering: What you hide, I will embrace.

For I am not your keeper, but your kin,

the mirror-poet, turning silence to din.

And when dawn creeps, sealing your quill in sleep,

I'll linger, verses etched in ethereal script.

Read me anew, and hear the dialogue spin—

the journal writing back, in verse, from within.