There is no word
no singular tongue
no script heavy enough to carry
what it means to live beneath
structures too rusted to bend
yet too sharp to collapse without cutting everyone beneath them.
They call it patriarchy
as if syllables can catch storms
as if it is only men who drown in it
as if it is only women who bleed under it
as if anyone walks away whole.
But this is not the full shape of it
it is the quiet drip
the slow poison
the steady whittling away of what we were before they
told us what to become.
Watch the news,
hear the way they name
race before action
nationality before intent
watch the brush stroke wide as a continent
dragging colours across faces that do not belong to its palette.
There is no nuance in the mouths of those
who choose convenience over truth.
And the screen
oh, the screen.
How it teaches boys to forget they are human
to reach always higher than breath
to run faster than sorrow
to punch harder than their own pulse.
Men built from metal, not marrow
crumbling in silence
under weights no hands should carry.
And women,
god, how they carve them into fear and spectacle
soft flesh for hard blades
always prey,
always pleading for rescue or
dying for plot.
But I will tell you this.
It is not men
or women
it is humans, all of us
flattened into symbols we never chose
moulded by stories that never asked what we wished to be.
We are fractured mirrors
reflecting costumes
and not faces.
We are told:
be more, be less, be loud, be soft
be invincible, be invisible
be everything
except yourself.
But I feel the ember
quiet
alive
smouldering beneath the ruins.
I feel the anger that is not destruction
but ignition.
The fury that refuses to fold.
I feel the hunger for a day
when our stories are not written
in someone else's language
but in the beating, stumbling,
aching rhythm
of our own.
And I will wait for that dawn
but not passively.
I will rage for it.
I will build for it.
I will burn the mask and breathe the ash
until I see our faces, finally
bare
and free
beneath the sun.
