You laugh at them. You point your finger and call them a fool. Their silence amuses you, their gentleness becomes your joke, and the crowd joins your laughter as if kindness were weakness. It feels enjoyable today, sweet on your tongue like careless victory. Their patience becomes your stage, their humility your entertainment. But time is a quiet witness. It watches without speaking, It writes its lessons slowly in the turning pages of life. A day will come When laughter turns into tears. The echoes of your mockery will return to your own ears like thunder across an empty sky. Situations will arise without warning, storms without hands to beat you Yet heavy enough to break your pride. Pain will arrive quietly, And you will feel the trembling of a heart that once laughed too loudly. And that fool, that funny person you once mocked, may stand in the distance, not laughing, but witnessing your tears, your shaking voice, Your falling ego. For life has a patient way of bending the tallest p...
No mercy within,
only the quiet arithmetic of harm,
where evil moves in polished shoes
and pretence carries the lantern.
It is the gentle voice
that sharpens the blade,
the smiling mouth
that buries the oath.
Thus the path is led,
not by stars,
but by shadows trained to look like light.
And still the road narrows.
It tightens into a corridor of thorns,
each step a covenant with pain,
each breath, a wager
against the dark.
Life though,
what a bitter tutor.
How do we live
in a world so fluent in cruelty?
Where trust lies pale and unattended,
a fallen monument no one tends;
where truth survives only in thin ribbons,
fragile as winter sunlight,
threaded through words
that tremble
because they are not born of the heart,
oh no.
Not from the heart.
From habit.
From hunger.
From the instinct to endure.
We speak in measured syllables,
ration our faith,
hide our tenderness
as though it were contraband.
We learn to walk the narrow way
with bleeding feet
and call it wisdom.
Yet somewhere,
beneath the thorns,
beneath the staged intentions,
beneath the long apprenticeship of distrust,
a stubborn ember refuses extinction.
For even in a cruel world,
to ask how we live
is already an act of defiance.
To seek truth,
though it be thin as a whisper,
is to widen the path by one breath.
Life though,
merciless, magnificent paradox,
it wounds,
it withholds,
it deceives,
and still
it waits to see
whether we will answer darkness
with its own language,
or dare—against reason,
to speak from the heart.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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