I'm different—
I get it.
I don’t speak the way you do,
I eat diversity for breakfast,
I don’t act like your mirror.

But I’m human.
Equally important.
Equally supreme.

Give it a rest—
I demand order.
I demand respect.
I should be treated as such.

I don’t wear inferiority
Like a badge I didn’t earn.
I won’t sit with minds
That think I’m beneath them—
When we all know
I’m the opposite.

You judge my roots
Like they shame me—
But they feed me.
They bloom strength
You’ve only ever tried to steal.

It’s a joke to you—
But my kind don’t spend their days
Belittling you.
They have positive change
They need to make
With their time.

To extricate myself from thoughts
That drown me—
Isn’t harm.
It’s healing.
It’s clear water.

Where I grow
Is not your prison of fear.
It’s the place
They wish they belonged—
Because I carry
What they could never hold.

A dead tree plank—
I guess I was sad it went away,
But at the same time,
It offered firewood,
A source of energy,
Of light,
Of campfire warmth.

What will my absence bring?
Will the weight of my leaving shift the earth?
Will my presence,
Removed,
Mean anything at all?

I notice things, I guess.
I motived the evasion—
The silent evasion,
The less-than-gentle encounters.
Ask me why I let things pass?
Because when I leave,
I have no regrets,
No reason to turn back
And think I didn’t give my best.
This is my goodbye.

The tangle of my words, my head—
Let me answer that:
It won’t.
It won’t change a thing.

Another tree will grow there,
Fresher, finer,
Casting the same shade I once gave.

And though I cannot stop myself,
The shade I offered,
The loud, the silent comfort—
Is easily replaced
By a shrub.

People should learn
how to speak like the sun—
direct, warm, no shade unless asked.
Age doesn’t buy you the right
to sharpen your tongue
on someone else’s silence.

Tone cuts deeper than words,
sarcasm isn't seasoning—
it’s a slow poison
unless served in laughter between equals.
Otherwise, it’s a leash
meant to drag dignity through dust.

I’m no saint in this mess.
But even wolves remember
the sting of a snare.

At 6 o’clock,
life circles back
to feed us everything we dished—
sweet or sour.

So if someone’s good enough
to breathe the same air,
don’t hand them thorns
for picking flowers.

Cutesy isn’t weakness.
It’s grace.
And grace bites back
when least expected.

It’s a tradition all over,
They did it—now I’m meant to fold,
To drink the same bitter brew they swallowed,
As if pain were heirloom gold.

It tasted like bitter leaf,
When they could have picked spinach instead.
Why choose the thorned path of grief,
When sweetness blooms just ahead?

They called it fate,
They called it duty,
But I call it what it truly is—
The burial of beauty.

I won’t conform to the old design,
Not every story ends in tears.
Nothing is impossible to redefine,
Not when courage outshines fears.

Their ideas creep like poison ivy,
Climbing fast, choking breath.
But I, I step aside—
I won’t go blind into that depth.

I deserve a candy cane,
Not another link in a chain.
I deserve love that doesn’t drain,
Not masked as honour, not soaked in pain.

So if they say I must kneel
In unions void of care and grace,
I will rise, steel in my heel,
With fire in my place.

Even if I must fight the skies,
The earth, the storm, the sea—
Let it be known—I won’t accept
What steals the soul of me.

I will not take any lees.
Only wholeness.
Only peace.