Poetry

I knew it was bad
when you didn’t even have to say it,
when I saw it in your eyes,
when I knew it in the way you folded your arms
and turned away when I spoke.

Democracy isn’t a mother
who shields you from the storm,
it’s the ghost of a father
who leaves when the lights flicker
and promises turn to dust
in his palms.

When I was younger 

Not yet a teenager 

I was

Unprepared and fragile

I had no armor

No ammunition

And yet I was put into

A battle

Me against

Every single person 

Two doors, both locked, neither mine.
Two names, one I gave up.
Two voices, both demanding I choose.
A home is a shelter. A home is a question.

There’s this song,

Slipping Through My Fingers.

By ABBA. From Mamma Mia!

That's how I see it.

Our rights.

“I try to capture every minute.”

There's a wasteland in my throat,

a desert of ice and snow

frozen over and stealing the sound,

cushioning it in its soft blows

of white cotton clouds.

Shut down the vocality of my vice

imagine this:
us, walking barefoot through the wreckage of melted roads
the sun carving epitaphs into a sky too scorched for rain.

They say the world was once wider,
measured in scraped knees and firefly nights,
in the space between streetlights,
where time was counted in the hush before dinner.

They call us the lost generation,

but how can we be lost when we see everything?

We inherited the ruins,

the sins of the past like notifications,

the echoes of greed carved into policy,

With voices like flint against steel,
we strike against the silence,
catching fire – not to burn, but to blaze a path forward.
We are not the dying cinders of something lost,
but the first furious glow of something rising.

TikTok scrolling, climate warming,
Ocean rising, forests burning,
AI whispering, futures shifting,
Polar ice caps, glaciers drifting.

Snowflakes danced through the still air,
Whispers of winter, crisp and fair.
Bare trees stood, their branches slight,
Cloaked in frost, bathed in white.