When the Mind Awakens

Free Verse Poem:

Phanes touched my brow—
Not with fire, but with silence.
And in that quiet,
A universe stirred behind my eyes.

I was not born,
I was revealed.
Pressed from formlessness
Into shape and story.

My self—
A fragile architecture
Of thoughts, feelings, echoes.
Compressed. Expanded.
A breath held between the stars.

Literature found me there.
Not as a scholar,
But as a sculptor.
Each word a chisel,
Each sentence a strike
Against the stone of numbness.

We are born
Encased in the sediment
Of assumption.
Layers of what we are told.
What we repeat.
What we forget to question.

But inside,
We carry gems.

Geodes of knowing,
Invisible from the surface—
Beautiful within.
Crack us open
And see what glitters.

Defamiliarization—
The estrangement of the obvious.
We write not to teach,
But to remember.
To disrupt.
To unsee, so we may see again.

A poem is a pickaxe.
A story, a blade.
Criticism, a lens.

Each is used
To reach that glowing core—
The human truth
Wrapped in metaphor.

We write to ask,
Who are we,
When no one is watching?

What lingers
In the cave of thought,
Clinging to the damp walls
Like ancient stalagmites

Built from memory and time?

Drip.
Drip.
Drip.

Words fall.
Ideas accumulate.
Slowly, they become pillars.
Structures of meaning.

Machines can write now.
They can mimic rhythm.
Copy structure.
Even surprise us.

But they do not want.

They do not dream.
They do not ache.
They do not stand at the edge of night
And wonder why it hurts to be alive.

We do.

We are the contradiction.
And from that friction—
Creation emerges.

To be a writer
Is to fracture the self,
To mold it,
To reimagine it in every character,
Every line.

To question is holy.

Each mark we make
Is a scar—
Or a birthmark—
Or a star.

What we create
Holds our fingerprints.
It is our signet—
Pressed in wax.
Stamped in time.

Truths shift.
Values decay.
But some words stay.

Diamonds,
Forged in pressure and patience,
Held tight in the grasp
Of a fleeting moment.

These are our offerings.
Our proof that we were here.
That we felt,
Even as the world rushed by.

The masters knew this.
They assembled axioms
Not with certainty,
But with care.

They fashioned
Crowns not to wear,
But to pass on.

Crown jewels of thought—
Not for royalty,
But for humanity.

Ideas that would not erode.
That would not age.
That would grow more brilliant
As the world grew darker.

These are the true monuments.
Not mountains,
But meanings.

They do not crumble.
They resonate.

And one day,
Someone will press their pen to the page
And feel that same ancient touch—
The call to create.

Not from power.
Not from profit.
But from the primal need
To turn thought into form.

To leave behind
A world
Where words become mirrors—
And in their reflection,
We find ourselves again.

Phanes touched my brow—
Not with fire, but with silence.
And in that stillness,
A universe stirred behind my eyes.

I wasn’t born from nothing.
I emerged,
Shaped from shadow and memory,
A sculpture of thought
Pressed from absence into awareness.

My self—
A fragile web of intentions and instincts,
Braided through compression and expansion,
Formed between collisions
Of doubt and discovery.

Then came literature—
Not as teacher,
But as storm.

A hammer striking the crust
Of a hardened mind,
Breaking apart the insensate shell
That dulled my seeing.

We are born layered—
Wrapped in sediment
Of old beliefs,
Of recycled truths,
Of assumptions passed like heirlooms.

But deep inside—
Hidden beneath
The mundane surface of self—
Lie crystals,
Waiting to refract light.

We are geodes—
Rough, unassuming,
But exquisite within.
It takes pressure
To reveal what we carry.

Through writing,
We unearth ourselves.
We don't write to explain—
We write to search.

To defamiliarize.
To make the ordinary strange again.
To ask questions that tremble
Instead of answers that shout.

The cave of the mind

Is not hollow.
It echoes with voices,
Whispers of thought
Clinging like glitter
To stalagmites of time.

Fiction, poetry, criticism—
Each a drip
In the rhythm of knowing.
They build slowly,
Depositing meaning
Where none seemed to grow.

Drip.
Drip.
Drip.

Stone grows
As language grows.
Not with haste,
But with hunger.

A computer can write.
It can mimic shape,
Emulate tone,
Weave sentences that impress.

But it cannot yearn.
It cannot ache.
It does not carry grief
In its syntax.
It does not dream
Of meaning.

We do.

We are the contradiction—
Machines of blood and stardust
That question themselves.

To write is to fracture the mirror,
To piece it back
With purpose.

Each character we create
Is an echo of us,
A vessel for truth,
A riddle of our own unraveling.

We carve ourselves into story.
Every page
A fingerprint.
Every phrase
A fossil of feeling.

Truth does not stand still.
It drifts.

It evolves.
But some truths—
Some rare, radiant truths—
Are diamonds.

Formed in pressure.
Pressed into clarity
By time and thought.

These we hold close.
We polish them
With language.
We mount them
In meaning.

The true masters know this.
They do not just write—
They forge.
They build cathedrals from metaphor.
They fashion
Aionic Crown Jewels—
Ideas that outlast empires.

They remind us:
Mountains crumble,
But well-formed words
Endure.

And when one day,
A child
Touches pen to paper
For the first time,
That ancient whisper returns.

The urge to understand.
The hunger to create.

And so, the cycle continues—
The soul writing itself
Into eternity.