oh mother and father to whom i am unlike
I know I am his child.
His mind hums in mine,
a gray hive I cannot silence.
His humor—hollow coins—
rattles in my mouth
when I try to speak my own name.
The world looks at me and sees him,
his outline burned into my skin,
his breath fogging my mirror.
Even my silence carries
his unfinished sentences,
his weight like a stone in the chest.
But I do not have his hands.
I do not carry their blue veins,
their grasp that held too tight,
their labor, their undoing.
My hands are pale as water,
open, empty, aching to cradle
something gentler than inheritance.
I walk behind his shadow,
but I will not step where he stepped.
I will not let his ghost
script my palms.
If I am his echo,
I will learn how to fade
into a softer silence.
I am not like my mother.
But her words get their own response,
her tone is matched,
her mirror finds another mirror.
But it is exclusive,
a dialect of blood and fire
I cannot enter.
I do not have that serpent tongue,
the hiss that splits a room,
the venom wrapped in lullabies.
I am a silence between their voices,
a pause that belongs to no one.
I am the unfinished note
in a house of clashing instruments.
Their echoes chase me,
but I do not join the choir.
Instead, I keep my quiet hands,
my unspilled mouth,
my vow of difference—
to leave their chorus behind,
to build a voice that does not wound,
to stand in the ruins and refuse
to inherit the fire.
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