I wonder how many walk the world starved,

not for food, not for sex,

but for the violent permission to feel

without shame.

We are love-malnourished,

touch-deprived,

emotionally exiled

by a world that confuses silence with strength

and teaches us to swallow grief

and call it survival.

We flinch at softness.

We fear kindness.

We wear independence like armor

and mistake the weight of it for healing.

Vulnerability became a wound

before it ever had the chance to be a bridge.

But we don’t want fixing.

We want safety,

to fall apart and not be left,

to feel without punishment,

to be held without becoming a burden.

We are not broken,

only starving,

for love that doesn’t make us bleed,

for tenderness that doesn’t keep score,

for arms that carry without cages.

And maybe salvation

is nothing more than this:

to be allowed to be as we are,

beside someone

who lets themselves be the same.

Pull the lever.

(Or did they pull it for you?)

The reels spin, symbols blur,

Cherry. Cherry. Skull.

Almost.

Always almost.

You call it voting, shopping, freedom.

But the machine was here before you,

and the symbols were painted on your eyes

before you even opened them.

Pull the lever.

Three cherries. Jackpot. Right?

No! The payout was promised in another life.

This life only gives you noise and flashing lights,

a simulation of winning.

Every coin you drop is your own time,

sliced into hours, stripped for data,

sold back to you as entertainment.

Pull the lever.

Even rebellion’s been given a reel,

Cherry. Skull. Raised fist.

Slogans pre-approved,

your outrage packaged in the same font

as last season’s soft drink campaign.

They hand you the script for your resistance,

and you recite it,

thinking it’s your own voice.

Pull the lever.

Sometimes I think the machine watches me.

Knows when my pulse spikes.

Knows when my eyes linger too long on the skulls.

Maybe it’s not even a machine anymore,

maybe it’s alive.

Maybe it’s mapping my mind in real time.

And maybe I’m not playing it at all.

Maybe it’s playing me.

Pull the lever.

I tell myself I could walk away,

but I don’t remember the door I came through.

I’m not even sure there was a door.

What if the lever isn’t in my hand at all?

What if my hand is the lever?

What if I’ve been the machine this whole time?

What if silence isn’t empty at all?

What if it’s the eye of the storm, the breath between the crash of waves, the pause before the world rushes forward again?

In that stillness, everything is waiting: voices unspoken, dreams gathering shape, a thousand lives unfolding behind closed eyes. A single moment of silence can hold more than noise ever could: grief, love, memory, hope, whole stories written in the spaces between sound.

Silence is the soil where new worlds are conceived. Inside it, galaxies stretch their arms before they are born, stars hum quietly before they ignite. Whole universes are rehearsed in the dark, preparing to spill into light. A person can live an entire lifetime there: healing, breaking, falling in love, saying goodbye, beginning again. The silence carries it all, like a womb cradling what the world has not yet seen.

And silence doesn’t have to be lonely. It can be a place where two souls find each other when the storm outside rages. Inside the eye, they twirl together, a slow dance where time bends, where every heartbeat is amplified, where the world cannot touch them. In that hush, they can laugh without sound, ache without words, love without limit. In their quiet, there is safety. In their stillness, there is eternity.

So when silence comes, I don’t see absence. I see possibility. I see storms gathering their power, I see worlds being written, I see dances that belong only to those brave enough to step inside the hush. Silence is not the end. Silence is the beginning

They don’t call it murder.

They call it procedure.

Call it compliance.

Call it enforcement.

Call it "just doing our jobs".

Like jobs don’t kill.

Like pens don’t stab.

Like a signature can’t be a blade.

They come at dawn

when the light is weakest.

Boots cracking pavement.

Radios coughing static.

Vans lined up like hearses.

Windows blacked out.

No witnesses.

No reflections.

No proof you ever stood there breathing.

Paperwork first.

Always paperwork.

Forms.

Clips.

Stacks of lives pinned together like receipts.

A paperclip biting through ten names at once.

Red stamp.

Denied.

Red stamp.

Removed.

Red stamp.

Gone.

Tell me how that isn’t execution.

Tell me how a desk isn’t a killing floor

when whole bloodlines vanish across it.

They don’t shoot you.

They unperson you.

Erase you softer than chalk.

Quieter than a grave.

A mother screaming in the street

while a man with gloves checks boxes.

Checkbox.

Checkbox.

Checkbox.

Like he’s ordering lunch.

Kids in socks on concrete.

Grandfathers shaking like loose change.

Hands zip-tied so tight the skin blooms purple.

Faces pressed into asphalt

like the earth is already rehearsing burial.

The air tastes like rust.

Like pennies.

Like blood you didn’t spill but still swallow.

And the street watches.

Curtains twitch.

Doors lock.

Nobody wants to be next.

Because genocide doesn’t start with fire.

It starts with neighbors learning

to look away.

Street by street.

House by house.

Name by name.

Not war.

Not accident.

Design.

Cold.

Deliberate.

Administrative slaughter.

We’ve seen this before

Don’t tell us this is new.

We’ve seen the footage.

The grainy black-and-white ghosts.

The piles of shoes.

The mass graves.

The paperwork signed by men who said

we were just following orders.

Every genocide starts tidy.

Starts legal.

Starts stamped and filed.

The killing only gets loud

after the world pretends not to hear the quiet part.

So we break glass.

Yeah, we break it.

Because what else do you do

when your life is being erased

with a clipboard?

What else do you do

when "justice" wears riot gear

and smiles like it’s mercy?

We throw our grief through windows.

We light our rage like flares.

We turn the night red enough

that they finally have to look.

This isn’t disorder.

This is survival with its teeth out.

This is a throat raw from chanting

NO MORE.

NO MORE.

NO MORE.

This is what happens

when you cage people long enough,

they stop knocking.

They start kicking doors.

Call it protest.

Call it riot.

Call it criminal.

We call it breathing.

Because every time that van door slams

another name disappears

like it never existed.

And if that isn’t killing,

what the hell is?

They say we’re violent for screaming.

But what do you call

a system that eats families whole

and wipes its mouth with policy?

What do you call a country

that files bodies alphabetically?

What do you call paper

that weighs more than a life?

Because silence looks too much like death.

Because calm sounds like a coffin lid.

Because if we don’t make noise loud enough to shake the sky,

they’ll finish the list.

And one day

there won’t be anyone left

to scream.