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

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.

In those words, they handed me a key—
to armour I wore unknowingly.
A mask that locked me in from the world,
its weight a comfort, strangely unfurled.

I turned it over in my hand,
traced edges I couldn’t understand.
I saw its shape behind closed eyes,
but stayed where silence felt like disguise—
From those walls I could not rise.

But then—
a whisper flickered through the hush,
not one I knew, not one I’d trust.

To face the world just naked skin,
not knowing what I’d held within,
each emotion crashed like waves too wide
for fragile bones to hold inside.
Each sound, a storm.
Each gaze,
A question I could not reply

I reached for the safety I had known,
but the walls were gone—crumbled stone.
The cracks beneath my feet grew wide,
until the world began to slide.
Alone, exposed, and trembling bare,
even silence stung the air.

But then—
the whisper came again,
not from beyond,
but deep within.

A murmur my body remembered,
from before I had words.
It offered no comfort, no retreat,
only truth—
raw and complete.

And in its truth—
a safety transformed,
not hiding,
but simply being

Wisened by battles I shouldn’t have known,
Yet still a child where dreams are grown.
Old in the weight I carry inside,
Young in the places I’ve yet to find.

Old in sorrow, young in my dreams-
Still reaching through the in-between.