“When Silence Bleeds”

“We Keep Breathing While the World Burns”

I scroll, and the glass glows back at me,

warm like a body, cold like a tomb.

It holds my secrets,

my fears,

my borrowed opinions stacked like fragile bones.

I tell myself it is a friend,

yet sometimes its heat scorches my palm

like the muzzle of a gun just fired.

I close my eyes,

but corpses march behind my lids—

children bleeding into classroom tiles,

mothers clawing through rubble,

fathers silent in a hunger that speaks louder than words.

How many times can one heart break

before it stops calling itself human?

I gave a coin to a man whose lips were split with thirst.

He clutched my hand like a lifeline

until my skin burned raw,

and still I knew it was not enough.

It will never be enough.

Politicians bow their heads in polished silence,

murmuring prayers over children they will never bury.

The monsters wear pressed suits,

smile for the cameras,

and hide their teeth behind polite lies.

And I—

I am left with the noise.

The endless scroll of war,

the shrieks that dissolve into pixels,

the ghosts that crawl through circuits into my mind.

Every day I ask:

Is witnessing the same as wounding?

Does silence make me guilty,

or does it keep me alive?

When the bullet cracks the air again,

I do not move.

I do not breathe.

I only watch it fly,

slow as a falling star,

toward another body, another story,

another page in a book already dripping with blood.

And somewhere deep,

a voice asks what I will do.

I have no answer,

only this trembling,

this futile act of writing

while the world burns on without mercy.