(still / life)
i’m not staying—
not choosing this inertia.
i’m welded here by exhaustion,
by the fucking static of survival.
this isn’t peace.
this is the slow choke of staying alive
while the world grinds its boot into your face
and calls it mercy.
the body’s tired of borders.
of rooms with locks.
of whispered allowances.
it builds its own feral space
under the noise, under the radar,
with rage in its teeth.
no declarations?
no.
this is a declaration—
a scream from the basement of the throat.
a blood-slick refusal
to make myself palatable.
i’m tired of the gentle ache.
let it blister.
i don’t leave
because escape is a fantasy
sold to the privileged.
i don’t arrive
because arrival is a goddamn myth
invented to keep us chasing doors
that only open inward.
i move.
like rot.
like revolution.
like a worm in poisoned soil
that still dares to tunnel.
i don’t stand still.
i rupture.
i vanish in plain sight.
i rethread this monstrous, magnificent shape
in rooms built to contain me.
survival is not a poem.
it’s a fucking war.
the days?
they smear like blood on the sheets.
language collapses.
the tongue forgets how to beg.
i stay, i stay—
but the “i” is cracked,
difficult to name,
dangerous to say out loud.
sometimes i hear myself—
a voice like gravel,
like asphalt burning,
echoing through walls
that were never mine to begin with.
i answer anyway.
no tidy story here.
only this:
a flicker with teeth,
a stillness that screams,
a body that breathes rage
when no one is watching.
i can’t stop crying.
WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE
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