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...
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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