Star-woven mind
"I stack hours like corpses, carry tasks like stones, smile like a blade held behind teeth."
This poem is for all the people with a star-woven mind. For the ones that are different from the infrastructure we have to navigate, the ones that don’t fit in with the mold this society has formed for us. For the ones that are too afraid to ask for help, too afraid to admit that they do not fit in. I see you. I hear you. I am you.
The walls tilt,
inch by inch,
pressing my ribs into the floor.
Light is too bright,
too slow,
too patient,
and the air tastes of instructions I cannot follow.
I move like a shadow through a house of mirrors,
each reflection accusing,
each surface whispering not enough.
My hands shake with calculation,
my spine hums with protest,
and the smallest sounds
are nails scratching glass
inside my skull.
They tell me how to live.
I nod. I obey.
Inside, everything fractures.
Every cell is a pendulum
swinging toward exhaustion.
I stack hours like corpses,
carry tasks like stones,
smile like a blade held behind teeth.
The world expects a river,
I am a tributary full of jagged currents,
overflowing, spilling, uncontainable.
Even joy is dangerous.
It strikes like lightning,
too intense to hold,
burning my chest,
leaving only heat and smoke.
Even rest feels like surrender,
like admitting the body has already failed.
Burnout crawls beneath my skin,
a slow, deliberate insect,
gnawing through bone and thought.
Heartbeats stutter like old engines,
pulse thrumming too fast, too slow,
a rhythm that refuses reason.
The body is a witness
to its own betrayal,
every nerve a confession.
I measure myself in failures.
Tasks left unfinished,
moments missed,
patience spent on silence,
everything the world calls normal
and I cannot be.
Trying itself becomes a kind of violence.
Still, inside me,
there is a hearth no one sees.
Walls of noticing,
ceilings of devotion,
floors of fire.
I feel more, see more, love more.
The world fears this.
The intensity is a wound
and a light.
I will always arrive exhausted,
always bear a weight they cannot perceive,
always feel like a misfit
on the paths of existence.