The Streets Know Me - Wickedness First

This piece lives in the tension most people pretend not to notice - the silent warfare of energy, perception, and unspoken judgment. "Wickedness Has Good Manners" explores the unsettling reality that hostility doesn't always arrive with noise. Sometimes it's polished. Sometimes it smiles. Sometimes it asks questions in a calm voice under fluorescent lights while something colder moves beneath the surface.
The poem captures the psychological awareness of walking into a room where nothing is visibly wrong, yet everything feels off. It's about instinct, about reading micro-expressions, about understanding that discomfort and danger are not the same thing. There's a clash here between lived experience and artificial environments - between street intuition and corporate choreography.
This isn't a story about paranoia. It's about perception. About that razor-thin space where intuition sharpens and silence becomes strategy. The poem dissects the invisible dynamics of power, composure, and energy - revealing how tension can exist without confrontation, and how wickedness often hides behind professionalism, etiquette, and controlled politeness.
It's reflective, unsettling, and deliberate. A meditation on awareness, survival, and the strange theater of human interaction where the loudest truths are rarely spoken aloud.