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We scroll past hunger,
Swipe through war,
Stream genocide like a genre
And call it being informed.
“You saw. You know. You are responsible,” they say,
As if we even have a hand to play.
They told us we are free,
Capable of changing all we see,
Masters of our fate,
Sculptors of tomorrow,
With tools made of choice
And maps etched in will
It’s never too late to find our voice.

They handed us mirrors,
Called them windows,
Taught us to vote,
A choice in the clownshow,
A chorus of masks all painted for show,
Just noise in a system too broken to grow.

We scroll past hunger,
Swipe through war,
Stream genocide like a genre
And call it being informed.
“You saw. You know. You are responsible,” they say,
As if we even have a hand to play.

But we are tethered
To systems too vast,
To machines too smooth,
To powers too cloaked.
Each of us a droplet,
Told we are the sea.
Told we are free.

Meanwhile, the giants feed,
Corporations gorge on grief,
Turn crisis into content,
They market empathy,
Sell back our outrage,
Anything to keep us engaged.

Work, once sacred,
Just motion now.
We turn cogs that turn nothing
And call it survival.

There is too much,
Too many truths,
Too many hands reaching from fires
We cannot put out.
We are choked by abundance,
Starving for sense.

So let the bombs rain.
Let the sky split open.
If collapse is the only honesty left—
Let it fall.
Let it fall
And save us from this pain.
Let them follow lines well-laid,
Their scripted paths in safe charade.
But don’t hold me to your labels and limits,
Drawn from shortcuts and fleeting minutes.

Let me be, let me fly,
To map my uncharted sky
I am flawed, lost in the depths,
Since I heard the silence beneath their steps.
Their map is lean—lines, signs and names,
Not seeing beyond the truth they claim.

Through their shortcuts, they place me in a cage,
A simple outline, they miss the weight behind the stage-
What’s soft, unseen, warped by age,
With complexity they cannot engage.

This map of mine holds space, nuance, weight,
Unmarked roads and altered states,
It charts the shifts of inner skies,
The truths that flicker in disguised eyes.
It honours detours, dwells in pause,
And bends around unspoken laws.

They see it, flawed, lost, estranged,
Too raw, too complex, too unarranged.
But their neat world cannot gauge the cost,
Of all the knowing they’ve lost

Let them follow lines well-laid,
Their scripted paths in safe charade.
But don’t hold me to your labels and limits,
Drawn from shortcuts and fleeting minutes.

Let me be, let me fly,
To map my uncharted sky
Survival’s a game,
Played without the rules,
Adapting, changing,
Yet seen as the fool.
Labeled wrong,
When I only tried to breathe,
Met with resistance,
What’s left to believe?

So I began to slip,
Let the fight drain from my grip.
Each label stitched with quiet scorn,
Made me smaller than I was born.
I wore erasure like a second skin —
To be forgettable was how I kept myself in.
Please, I beg:
I’ll do anything not to be.
And if that wish is too big,
I’ll do anything to hide where you can’t see.

I shrunk myself so small,
Set myself up to fall.
Climbed to heights,
Cloaked in my hidden fights,
The scheme was misbegotten,
I forgotten.
To answer your question,
An essay would be most apt,
I’ll route through the archives, sift through dusty drawers,
Plot the coordinates of where I have been and map out my thoughts.

But first I must know: what do you know?
Can you hold the depth, can you pause to reflect?

And in the moment, you hold my gaze,
The silence swelling,it’s  weight thick,
I am but a deer in the headlights,
Startled, still and blank,

So in answer to your question,
I’m fine.
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