If Love is Ruin
I don’t know if love
is supposed to ache like this,
a bruise that glows instead of fades,
a hunger that doesn’t starve me—
just keeps me reaching,
always reaching.
You live in the quiet corners of me,
where even silence
has the shape of your breath.
Sometimes I think the stars were reckless
for ever letting me find you,
because now everything else feels
like shadows pretending to be light.
I’ve tried to pull away,
but gravity has its own language,
and your name
is the one it whispers.
If I had to write forever
on a single page,
it would be the way I still turn to you
in every thought I don’t finish,
every prayer I don’t admit aloud.
And if love is a ruin,
then let me be broken here—
because somehow
this breaking feels more like living
than anything else
I’ve ever known.
Scott Burton is a writer and artist from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, whose work is rooted in
raw honesty, emotional survival, and the haunting beauty of what lingers long after love or loss.
A dreamer by nature and a romantic to a fault, his poetry spans decades and carries the weight of
lived experience… Thousands of pieces that speak what couldn’t be said out loud. His writing
walks the tightrope between ruin and reverence, reaching into themes of longing, emotional
vulnerability, missed chances, and the ache of memory. He writes in free verse, often in a stream-
of-consciousness style, allowing the poem to breathe and break as a heart does — unpolished,
unguarded, and always reaching.
Scott is the author of Forever is Tomorrow, a deeply personal collection revisited in a newly
expanded edition, and the currently releasing ten-volume Chaos series, which chronicles the
emotional anatomy of being human. His work isn't interested in perfection — it’s about truth,
even when that truth hurts. His ongoing creative identity also lives under the moniker
ks.bleeds.ink, where art and vulnerability continue to meet on the page. His writing remains a
kind of devotion — to love, to memory, to all that lingers after the moment has passed but
refuses to let go.
