I invite you, Water.
Douse this searing fire.
Quench what is scorched.
Soothe what is cauterized,
picked raw, and researed
in the heat of forgetting.

Let scabs decompose to mud.
Let me be Earth--
steady, grounded, whole.

Yet I am Wind,
caught in flame,
lifting embers before they cool,
scattering what was,
before it settles into dust.

Justice hikes her skirt
to swing ox-bowed legs
onto the gallow plank.
Eyes wide open, covered
not with a blindfold, but
a bag over her head-
hands-bound and weightless.
The bottom drops out.

I heard them—
low voices curling through the dark,
soft as breath, sharp as broken glass.
I wasn’t supposed to hear.
But I did.

My name—
slipped from their mouths like a secret too heavy,
like a blade drawn slow.
And suddenly,
the walls felt too close,
the air too thick,
the space between us, a battlefield.

I knew what this was.
I’d seen the signs.
The hush when I entered,
the careful glances,
the way the night swallowed their words whole.

I knew—
I knew.

So I lunged.
Didn’t hesitate, didn’t breathe,
just cut.
Words like wildfire,
rage like a flood,
my voice a wrecking ball crashing through their quiet.

And then—
stillness.

No fight.
No denial.
Just eyes wide, hands empty,
hearts bleeding from wounds they never saw coming.

A gift, they said.
A surprise, they said.
A moment of joy,
crushed beneath the weight of my fear.

And suddenly, I am the villain.
The shadow in the room.
The storm where there should have been sun.

I built a monster out of whispers,
let it crawl into my bones,
let it tell me the only story I wanted to hear.

And now, here I stand,
watching trust turn to dust,
watching love fade into silence,
watching them walk away—

because I never thought to ask
before I chose to burn.

The meek nestles into the dark,
where power hums like a distant storm,
where strength, sharp-edged and waiting,
does not strike, does not break.

It does not cower.
It does not beg.

Fragility leans into force,
where dominion is not destruction
but a burden, a silence, a choice.

The strong does not devour.
The strong does not yield.

Between them, an understanding—
not spoken, not sworn,
but written in breath,
in the weight of stillness,
in the knowledge that power alone
withers without something to shelter,
and meekness alone
shatters without something to bear it.

The world does not see the balance,
but they do,
and so, for now,
they remain—unchallenged,
unbroken.

"The way you think, you feel.
The way you feel, you vibrate.
The way you vibrate, you attract.
The way you attract, you act.
And the way you act, you create."