Toxic Rapper Poet Free verse

I am not Promised

I crept to the edge of death and asked him why he hadn’t arrived on November 21st, 2026.
Death looked at me with a startled furrow, flipping through his ledger as pages snapped beneath his fingers. He searched for my name on that date, but it wasn’t there.

“I didn’t come,” he said, “because it wasn’t written.”

I felt the bitterness rise.

“I trusted Love, and it failed me. Now I stand before you, and you’ve failed me too. How dare you hold power over people with no intention of honoring what your silence promises? Why lie?”

Death’s expression hardened.
“Boy,” he rumbled, “do not question me nor my timing. I have always kept true. I’ve walked into places so forsaken even I have died retrieving a soul — yet I still did so.”

And yet here I was: dead, but somehow still breathing.
A ghost among the living.

What a cruel joke —
to love until you die,
to die while still loving,
in a world that claims to offer both and misses the mark from every angle.

“If you won’t take me because you claim I’m not dead,” I said, “then I’ll do it myself.”
I stepped toward the street, declaring:

“I, Vincent HarGrave, will be my own death from here on.”

But as I moved, Death snapped his head up.

“What name did you just spew before me?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I said.

Death’s hands tore through his pages with a fury I’d never seen.
“I know that name. Where is it—where is it— DAMMIT”

“I am Vincent HarGrave,” I said, stepping into the street as headlights surged toward me, freezing me in their glare like a deer caught in mid-eternity.

The impact never came.

I stood untouched. Unbroken. Confused.

“How is this possible?” I whispered.

Death exhaled and closed the ledger.

“Because I already claimed you,” he said.
“You didn’t die on November 21st. You died three years ago — the day you begged Love to help you forget her.”

I felt the words cut deeper than any blade.

“You asked Love to ease your suffering,” Death continued, “and Love told you to endure. In your rage, your heartbreak, your betrayal, you killed the part of yourself that felt. The part that kept you alive. You forsook your own heart and soul.”

“I couldn’t take you,” Death said softly.
“You weren’t promised to me. All I could do was hold the keepsakes of what remained.”

He reached out as if touching something only he could see.

“You linger because you are neither living nor gone. And I allow it — not as punishment, but as the only death I can offer you. A death meant to reveal the truth you refuse to face.”

Death stepped closer, voice low.

“You’re not loving to die, Vincent.
You’re dying to Love.
And instead of asking when I will take you…
you should be asking when Love died —
and why you let it.”

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