StephanusM
My 5th journal "Is It Better to Speak or to Die" is the first time I'm letting every guarded thing out of my chest at once. For years I swallowed storms, smiled with blood in my mouth, and called it manners. I let love cut me open and then hid the wound because "too much" felt safer than the truth. These pages are where I finally stopped. Every poem in here is a shard I refused to swallow again. They're messy, loud, bleeding, sometimes ugly, always mine, and they all answer the same question I've carried since I was sixteen: when the truth could ruin everything, do you still speak, or do you die quietly?
I chose to speak.
This book is what that choice looks like when it's no longer polite.