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anomalous-revelationsPoems
I was baptized in violence before I ever knew God. Not water, but hands. Not prayer, but threats dressed up as discipline. I was taught pain before I learned language. Hands came first. Words came sharper. My name was spoken like a warning. My body learned the alphabet of fear. Flinch, fold, survive. Love arrived wearing boots and taught me how to bleed quietly. I learned early that pain lasts longer when you make noise, so I swallowed my screams until they grew teeth and started chewing me from the inside. “Children should be seen and not heard.” I learned early how to disappear without leaving. Childhood wasn’t stolen. It was hunted. Tracked through hallways, cornered in small rooms, taught that mercy was accidental and safety was a rumor. My childhood lives in my shoulders. That permanent lift, like I’m bracing for a blow. Every silence sounds loaded. I grew up fast because survival doesn’t wait for permission or for softness. It demands it! By the time I was grown my bones were already tired. My nervous system lived like a war zone. Sirens in the blood, shrapnel in the breath. Even joy felt dangerous, like standing too close to fire after you’ve learned what burns do. I found relief where I could. In bottles that promised forgetting, in habits that slowed the noise. Vibrations that hummed just loud enough to drown out the echo. I didn’t want oblivion. I wanted mercy. I wanted the screaming to lie down. But mercy is expensive, and I always paid in myself. Now I am the cornerstone of a house built on unspoken damage. I don’t get to crack. I don’t get to kneel. If I collapse, everyone else falls through me. I carry generations that never healed, so they handed their hurt to me like inheritance. Generational grief wrapped in familiar faces, asking me not to drop it. Some nights I can feel the pressure compressing my organs, turning breath into work, turning love into obligation. Some days I feel like a dam plugged with my own ribs so no one sees the looming flood. I wake up already exhausted from holding tomorrow together. Bone-deep exhaustion. I am praised for my strength by people who don’t hear the sound it makes when it fractures. I am called reliable because I never break in public. Because I learned long ago that breaking is a luxury reserved for people who were protected. Still, I remain! Scarred, yes. Shaking, often. But here. Every day I choose not to disappear, which might be the most violent act of defiance I know. Every day I stay alive despite the part of me that learned survival by imagining escape. I am proof that brutality failed to finish the job. That addiction didn’t win. That the child who endured grew into a man who refuses to abandon himself the way others did. I am not gentle because life wasn’t. But I am tender in ways that matter. I protect because no one did. I endure because someone had to. And if this world ever asks how much one person can hold before they shatter, let my body be the answer. Let my survival be loud. Let my pain be believed. Let the child who was hurt know this: You did not deserve it. You never did. And you are still here, bleeding light through every crack.
0
Feb 6
Feb 6, 2026 at 11:53 AM UTC
Built on What Tried to Break Me
I was baptized in violence before I ever knew God. Not water, but hands. Not prayer, but threats dressed up as discipline. I was taught pain before I learned language. Hands came first. Words came sharper. My name was spoken like a warning. My body learned the alphabet of fear. Flinch, fold, survive. Love arrived wearing boots and taught me how to bleed quietly. I learned early that pain lasts longer when you make noise, so I swallowed my screams until they grew teeth and started chewing me from the inside. “Children should be seen and not heard.” I learned early how to disappear without leaving. Childhood wasn’t stolen. It was hunted. Tracked through hallways, cornered in small rooms, taught that mercy was accidental and safety was a rumor. My childhood lives in my shoulders. That permanent lift, like I’m bracing for a blow. Every silence sounds loaded. I grew up fast because survival doesn’t wait for permission or for softness. It demands it! By the time I was grown my bones were already tired. My nervous system lived like a war zone. Sirens in the blood, shrapnel in the breath. Even joy felt dangerous, like standing too close to fire after you’ve learned what burns do. I found relief where I could. In bottles that promised forgetting, in habits that slowed the noise. Vibrations that hummed just loud enough to drown out the echo. I didn’t want oblivion. I wanted mercy. I wanted the screaming to lie down. But mercy is expensive, and I always paid in myself. Now I am the cornerstone of a house built on unspoken damage. I don’t get to crack. I don’t get to kneel. If I collapse, everyone else falls through me. I carry generations that never healed, so they handed their hurt to me like inheritance. Generational grief wrapped in familiar faces, asking me not to drop it. Some nights I can feel the pressure compressing my organs, turning breath into work, turning love into obligation. Some days I feel like a dam plugged with my own ribs so no one sees the looming flood. I wake up already exhausted from holding tomorrow together. Bone-deep exhaustion. I am praised for my strength by people who don’t hear the sound it makes when it fractures. I am called reliable because I never break in public. Because I learned long ago that breaking is a luxury reserved for people who were protected. Still, I remain! Scarred, yes. Shaking, often. But here. Every day I choose not to disappear, which might be the most violent act of defiance I know. Every day I stay alive despite the part of me that learned survival by imagining escape. I am proof that brutality failed to finish the job. That addiction didn’t win. That the child who endured grew into a man who refuses to abandon himself the way others did. I am not gentle because life wasn’t. But I am tender in ways that matter. I protect because no one did. I endure because someone had to. And if this world ever asks how much one person can hold before they shatter, let my body be the answer. Let my survival be loud. Let my pain be believed. Let the child who was hurt know this: You did not deserve it. You never did. And you are still here, bleeding light through every crack.
anomalous-revelations
Written by
anomalous-revelations
American
Feb 6
Feb 6, 2026 at 11:53 AM UTC
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