More than most,
I live like a ghost.

A silhouette they narrate,
An image they curate.
Perceived,
And not received.

I’m Just a fable,
With no seat at the table,
They script my role,
And Forget my soul.

I sit in silence,
cloaked in shame,
out of the frame

As if my quiet
isn’t ache.
As if my presence
is a mistake.

They do not ask.
They do not wait.
They build my story
second-rate.

And still I walk
through crowded halls,
heard by none,
contained by walls.

A tethered breath,
a haunted pace,
living in light
without a place.

This world moves fast —
too sharp, too loud.
No space for ghosts
within the crowd.

I learn their language,
speak it well,
but live in rooms
they cannot spell.

I am not yours
to silence or save.
I am not the ghost —
you are the cave.

I trace the contours of this alchemy,
Charting hidden forces in the galaxy.
Alive on a rock in a sky full of stars —
Yet we forget the miracle this is,
Trapped in a system that leaves us with scars,
Driven by need, and devoured by hunger.

Life itself — a quiet kind of magic —
Which makes what follows all the more tragic.
A fire rages, buried deep in me,
Burning in places
No one can see.

For all my striving, for all my wisdom,
I can’t find a way to exist in this system.
I was not born to survive in a cage,
To trade my light for minimum wage.
They ask me to shrink, to silence the song,
But the music inside me is centuries long.

They fear what they can’t understand,
So they hand me a leaflet
And call it a plan.
But I was made of questions,
Of patterns and flame —
Not for this circus
That plays the same game.

Spirit, body, and mind —
I’ve fought to keep them aligned.
Shaped myself like a lump of clay,
Measured my life
One percent a day.

But I toiled under a false premise,
That this world would reward the climb.
And now I’m standing in the wreckage,
Realizing — it never saw me,
Not even one time.

Where is there left for me to turn,
But to step back, and watch it burn?
To deny the world the worth it won’t see.
Let the smoke rise where I once stood —
A ghost made of fire, misunderstood.

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.