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Still, calm and noiseless
The charade bustling street is at rest Emeritus drawing from the overflow Well of Knowledge Birthing life in white and black Emptiness! A fight of vanity Isolated in the other world Waging war against inner demons Ranging from human venoms To cracking rumor Conspicuously muted Her Mouth is sealed Yet, she raced in heart As she swims across oceans of thoughts Mi Corazón esta perturbado The bang is louder Will she yield to its call? Again, this tune fascinates me Will she dance to the rhyme? It all resonates with my soul! This arrow pierces through her heart It aches like a kiss of blade Rivers ceaselessly flow through Her balls, sad but true Her guard is down Imminent pains of gains Applauds her tenacity Her breast flapped in agony Of want and needs Reality is falsified They all speak the familiar language of danger Project of death in a lovely package No more fight in paradise Paranoid by paralysis of desire Who wins, the demon or me? This shadow deep in hollow May one day hallow her hassle Shackles of lack Luck and will Trends afar her The cloud is ‘bout resting Before dawn I valiantly beat him To rust and dust Though choked but she moves! Till next episode Where the moon bows out to the sun I shall retain my strength To wind through the storm And sail across the Nile
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When first we open our eyes to the world,
tiny fists clutching the boundless, we are cradled as enough-- fragile, infinite, perfect in the gaze of love. No questions asked, no measure weighed; we are simply here, and that is all. But the world, sharp-edged and brimming with voices, sees not the light we carry. It begins its chiseling, its carving of worth from the outside in. “You are too dark,” it says, “too pale, too slow, too loud.” “You love the wrong way.” “You dream too big.” “You belong elsewhere, but not here.” With every glance, every word unspoken, the mirrors around us shatter. Each shard reflects another flaw we didn’t know we had. What once felt infinite now seems confined to the lines others draw around us. We shrink to fit their frames, contorting ourselves to be seen as something—anything—close to enough. And when we cannot shrink further, we fall. Fall into the silences of our own making, lost in the echoes of “not enough.” We let the weight of their judgments shape the way we see ourselves: broken, unworthy, incomplete. The soft hum of self-belief quiets beneath the roar of the world. Enough becomes a weapon. It shifts and twists in the hands of others-- “You are good enough for now,” they say, with kindness that stings. “Is this all you’ve got? Surely it’s not enough.” “You’ll never be enough.” The word folds in on itself, its edges cutting deep, turning possibility into limitation, turning wholeness into doubt. But enough is not static. It moves, it grows. It becomes a breaking point: “I have had enough!” Enough of their rules, their assumptions, their smallness that demands we make ourselves smaller. It becomes a reckoning: “I am enough for myself.” It becomes a declaration: “I have more than enough to give.” Rebuilding begins slowly, tentative as a newborn’s first breath. Piece by piece, we reclaim the shards others discarded. We stitch together the moments we thought were too small to matter-- the resilience in our tears, the kindness in our failures, the courage it takes to try again. And yet, rebuilding is not a single act. It is the slow, deliberate sifting of noise. The voices that once roared “not enough” still linger, insistent and unyielding. Their echoes creep in during quiet moments, whispering, testing, taunting. So we sit with them. We let the noise speak, not to believe it, but to understand where it came from. In the clutter of doubt, we search-- for the voice beneath the noise, the one that is our own. This is the hardest work: to unlearn the lies we were told, to untangle the barbed wires of judgment, to separate the truth of who we are from the weight of who we were told to be. But in the stillness of reflection, truth begins to emerge, a fragile whisper at first: “I am enough.” With every step forward, the whisper grows louder, until it becomes a steady song: “I am enough. Not because I am perfect, but because I am here.” And as this truth takes root, our gaze turns outward. We see the brokenness in others, the weight they carry of being told they are less. But we know now-- we know the lie, the cruel game of measuring worth. Enough is no longer a question, nor a weapon, but a promise. It holds space for our flaws, our beauty, our growth. It reminds us that in being ourselves, we are sufficient. In their eyes, we see the same glimmer, the same light that no voice can extinguish. And so we say: “You are enough, too.” Not because you’ve proven it, but because you’ve always been. Let the world try to tear us down. Let it question, measure, compare. We will answer with the quiet defiance of knowing: We are not perfect, but we are whole. Not better, not worse-- simply, wholly, enough. They told me the curse was a kindness,
a spindle’s prick to spare the kingdom from the burden of my broken mind. “Let her sleep,” they said, “Her thoughts too sharp, her tongue a thorn, her dreams too vast for walls to hold.” But I did not sleep. Not in the way they meant. In my cage of roses, I lay awake, each thorn a needle threading whispers: What if the curse was never kindness? What if the silence wasn’t mercy? What if my dreams were a forest they feared to enter? I grew wild there. The briars were mine. When the prince came, blade in hand, I laughed to see him bleed-- for once, the world bent to my thorns. He begged for a kiss to break the spell. Instead, I offered him my dreams: a tangle of shadows too sharp to untie. Let him sleep now. Let him know what it means to carry a forest inside. I was always the broken one,
a jagged shard of mirrored light. The fairest of them all-- but they never told me fairness was a curse. When they laid me in the glass coffin, the dwarves wept salt that carved rivers in their faces. They did not know the coffin was not a tomb but a lens. Through it, I saw the prince’s approach, his perfect features fractured by the warped glass. I saw the cracks in his smile, the pity behind his eyes. I saw myself as they saw me: a body polished and preserved, an object too fragile to touch but too pretty to let go. So I shattered the glass with my unkissed lips, cut my way out of their story, and left the prince bleeding on the forest floor. He called me wicked, but wicked is just what they name us when we break the molds they cast us in. I wandered until I found a mirror that didn’t lie. And in its broken face, I saw my own reflection-- whole at last. No matter how we pray or sorrow, no matter how we festoon bells and lights, no matter how we wrap and sing and bake and make lists of the futures we want, this winter might be masked and frazzled. Invoke a solstice astral alignment. Bargain with politics and viruses cajole the antique angel doorknob-dreaming. Light a flameless candle in the back window. Have cinnamon and old movies on hand. Find one craftstore present significant because it makes you laugh-- a little stuffed lion with glittery fur and a unicorn horn; improbable connundrum of strength and myth. Mail the tailed talisman on its perilous journey cross-country to a land of tumbleweeds and dewless skies. Your friend will shake his head questioning long-distance intentions. But some nights, we each need to believe. Dancing toys, talking animals, taps on the midnight roof. Telescopes or televisions trained. Everyone is looking for their cure. About the author:
Blind American author Nancy Scott's over 975 essays and poems have appeared in magazines, literary journals, anthologies, newspapers, and as audio commentaries. Her latest chapbook appears on Amazon, The Almost Abecedarian. She won First Prize in the 2009 International Onkyo Braille Essay Contest. Recent work appears in *82 Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Braille Forum, Chrysanthemum, Kaleidoscope, One Sentence Poems, Pulse Voices, Shark Reef, Wordgathering, and The Mighty, which regularly publishes to Yahoo News. |
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