The Weight

Each dawn arrives, but I do not rise—

a stone sits heavy on my chest,

pressing the air from my lungs,

leaving me hollow,

leaving me gasping.

The clock repeats its sermon,

tick after tick,

a cruel reminder

that yesterday never left—

it only dressed itself in today.

Anxiety coils around my ribs,

a serpent that never loosens,

whispering every wrong turn,

every “what if,”

until silence feels impossible.

Depression is the echo,

a looped recording in my skull:

stay down, stay tired, stay still.

It pulls me into its orbit,

a black star burning through my veins.

Morning should mean rebirth,

but for me it is replay.

I wake not to light,

but to weight—

and each breath feels like surrender.

The Butterfly’s Ascension

Once, I was bound to earth,

a prisoner wrapped in silence,

my body a coffin of stillness,

my breath trembling against the walls of change.

The world mocked my frailty,

called me nothing but a crawling shadow,

a husk without destiny.

But deep inside, a fire stirred—

the whisper of wings unborn,

a storm pressed tight in fragile skin,

a promise written in the marrow of my being.

I dissolved in darkness,

surrendered my shape to oblivion,

each cell a battlefield of death and rebirth.

It was agony—

to burn without flame,

to die without grave,

to become without knowing what I would be.

Then came the rupture—

my tomb cracked open,

and light poured in like thunder.

I rose, trembling,

my body sculpted by suffering,

my wings dripping with the colors of storms and sunsets.

I took flight.

Every beat of my wings

was a defiance,

a hymn against despair,

a cry that what breaks me

also exalts me.

I am not the crawling thing they remember.

I am not the husk left behind.

I am sky-born fire,

a fleeting miracle,

fragile yet immortal in my dance.

I carry eternity in my wings,

though time will wither me.

For a moment, I am glory incarnate—

a whisper of divinity passing through mortal eyes.

And when I fall,

the earth will not mourn—

but the air will remember

the thunder of my fragile flight.

Out of the mud

The mud pulls me under,

thick silence clinging to my skin,

a weight of sorrow pressing down,

whispers of doubt

curling around my lungs.

I sink,

but not forever.

With trembling arms

I heave against the sludge,

my muscles tearing,

then knitting themselves stronger.

Each fall teaches me

a new way to rise.

Every descent sharpens

the angles of my vision,

bending despair

into shapes of wisdom.

The darkness

gives me strange sight:

to see fractures in the world

where light can pour through,

to hear songs

hidden beneath the noise.

Creativity blooms

in the cracks of my struggle.

Perspective ripens

in the soil of my pain.

Innovation hums

like blood in my veins.

Empathy grows

where scars once lived.

I learn,

again and again,

to wrestle with gravity

and come up breathing.

And when the mud

clutches at me longer,

I rise to remember:

what doesn’t kill you

makes you stronger.

The Weight of My Own Hands

 I breathe in ash and starlight,

my lungs stitched shut with threads of longing.

Every pulse inside me whispers: create, create,

as though eternity itself would vanish

if I set down my brush, my pen, my song.

The joy is a fever—

it burns through the marrow,

each idea a flame licking the walls of my ribs.

I am radiant in the fire,

but oh, how it consumes me.

When stillness comes,

when silence settles on the table,

I drown in its gravity—

a crushing tide pressing on my chest,

reminding me that without the act of making,

I am only clay,

mortal, unfinished.

And yet, I reach again for the weight,

choose suffocation over emptiness.

Because even as it strangles,

creation sings me awake—

and in the pain of it,

I feel most alive.

The Forge of My Scars

Once, I cursed the ache

that lived beneath my ribs,

a restless ember smoldering,

burning without flame.

I thought it only hollowed me—

a thief in the night

that stripped my voice,

left me trembling in silence.

But pain is a teacher,

brutal and uninvited.

It sharpens the senses,

pulls the veil from the eyes,

makes every shadow visible,

every whisper louder.

It carved caverns in me,

rooms I never wanted,

yet in those hollowed chambers

echoes began to sing.

Songs I could not have written

without the ache of remembering.

Through suffering I learned

the tender map of empathy,

the small tremor in a voice,

the glimmer of fear

in someone else’s eyes.

Because I had been there—

I could see what others hid.

And now,

when I create,

I know the colors more deeply:

crimson of longing,

violet of sorrow,

gold of survival.

The wounds did not ruin me—

they refined me.

The pain I carried

became the proof I lived,

and in its wake

I became sharper,

softer,

truer—

a vessel for beauty

that could only be born

from brokenness.