Their hands are not empty,
but what they hold burns like a stolen sun.
Their breath is shallow,
choked by the weight of choices
that were not theirs to make.
We see them on the street corners,
in the back alleys,
through the bars of their laughter or their cells—
and in their eyes, we find ourselves:
not strangers, not others,
just flesh warring against what it was given.
They know what not to do,
but not what to do.
And in worlds where what not to do are rewarded
more than the things that we should be doing,
what is knowing but a wound?
The game is rigged.
They climb and climb toward a ladder that leads nowhere,
where every rung snaps beneath them
but falling feels like the only way to rise.
To take is survival.
To give is surrender.
To feel is a liability they cannot afford.
Etched in the blood of generations.
This is hopelessness named plainly,
a thing that does not cry but swallows whole.
They reach, not for escape,
but for distraction—
a smoke, a thrill, an empire
built of things that sometimes crumble.
The moment they are touched,
Their crowns are paper,
their kingdoms ash,
but even a spark feels like warmth
when you are born in the cold.
And we look,
but what can we say?
What words are there for this war
when we too feel its weight,
feel it gnawing at the edges of our lives?
To live is to fight a battle you didn't choose,
to lose is to take from others
what was already taken from you.
And the distance between knowing and doing
is a chasm that swallows even the best of us.
