There is a place inside you No map has ever traced, a quiet room behind the ribs where light forgets to stay. No one sees it when you smile, No one hears it when you speak. It moves beneath your laughter like a river running deep. It is yours alone to carry, not carved for other hands, a language made of silence Only your soul understands. Some mornings it is heavier, a stone you cannot name, And still you rise and wear your life as if it were the same. But pain, it does not leave you when ignored or pushed away, it waits within the folds of time, it learns you day by day. It is not your enemy, though it cuts without a sound; it is the truth you buried but still lives underground. And yes, there are nights it breaks you, when endurance feels too wide, when even breath feels borrowed And there is nowhere left to hide. Yet somehow you continue, not because you do not fall, but because within the breaking You still answer life’s call. You learn to walk beside it, not beneath it, not above...
I ache as though pierced by steel,
yet my body stands unbroken,
no blood to testify,
no scar to translate the suffering.
The wound lives where eyes cannot reach
a silent hemorrhage of the heart.
My chest carries a constant unrest,
a grief that refuses sleep.
Peace has fled my inner chambers,
leaving behind a hollow echo
where hope once knelt and breathed.
My soul is not shattered in violence,
but dismantled slowly,
piece by piece,
by hands skilled in quiet harm.
I was spent like something disposable,
used, then discarded without ceremony,
my worth measured only
by how much could be extracted from me.
Compensation came as crumbs of mercy,
food offered not as respect,
but as one feeds the forgotten,
as though I were a stranger to dignity,
homeless beneath the roof of my labor.
What a merciless master you were,
to turn authority into cruelty,
to confuse command with ownership,
and power with the right to diminish.
Yet even now, unseen and aching,
I carry what you could not consume:
a voice bruised but unextinguished,
a soul wounded yet aware,
and the quiet certainty
that no man who feeds on another’s suffering
ever truly stands tall.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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