I wake up choking on a silence too loud,
a pressure too thick,
a world too heavy to hold.
The sky burns, the ground splits,
oceans rage and swallow coastlines whole.
The wind howls, but not like a whisper—
no, this is the sound of the earth wailing,
a voice no one listens to
until the flames lick their own backyards.
I watch the men in suits,
the ones with silver tongues and hollow eyes,
who smile like they’ve never known hunger,
like they’ve never known fear.
They talk in circles,
build castles out of lies and call it leadership.
They move pieces on a board we’ll never touch,
and we, we are just numbers,
figures in the fine print,
sacrifices they will never make.
The price of life rises,
not just in dollars but in dignity.
We pay in exhaustion, in silence,
in the breaking of our own backs.
We barter our dreams for survival,
trade our peace for productivity,
watch our time slip away like water cupped in shaking hands.
They tell us to work harder,
as if the hours in the day stretch for them differently.
As if we haven’t already given everything,
as if our hands aren’t raw from holding up a world
that was never built for us.
And yet—
I see them sit high in their towers,
sipping champagne as cities drown below.
They let forests burn,
let hunger spread,
let justice rot,
and when we demand answers?
They give us excuses wrapped in polished words,
expect us to swallow the poison like it’s medicine.
They steal the future and sell it back to us in scraps.
They break the world, then blame us for bleeding.
They dangle hope like a prize we’ll never win,
then call us ungrateful when we reach for it.
They build walls and borders,
cages and checkpoints,
divide land like it was theirs to own.
Call it law, call it order—
but what they mean is control.
They mean: you stay there, and we stay here.
They mean: your survival is not our concern.
They turn away the desperate,
close doors in the faces of the fleeing,
watch families drown at their shores
and say, this is not our problem.
But it was their wars that sent them running,
their greed that stole the land,
their hands that drew the lines that cut people in two.
And we see them.
We see the rot, the greed, the hands stained in oil and power.
We see their golden parachutes while the rest of us fall.
We see their boardroom meetings, their backroom deals,
their bloodstained wealth stacking higher than our graves.
And we are done.
Done waiting, done begging, done being crushed.
We will not sit still.
We will not bow.
We will not break for them.
We are the storm they fear,
the ground shaking beneath their feet,
the wildfire that will not be contained.
And yet,
we endure.
Not because we are unbreakable—
God knows we are breaking—
but because we have each other.
Because in the chaos,
in the fire,
in the drowning,
there are still voices rising.
There are still hands reaching.
There is still something left to fight for.
So we breathe, even when the air is thick with smoke.
We stand, even when our knees buckle under the weight.
We move forward, even when the world pulls us back.
Because if we don’t—
who will?
Powerful thoughts. Thank you