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76
Student @ Ahmadu Bello University Zaria
THE WEIGHT OF SILENCE
<p>I walk like a thief under my own skin,</p><p>stealing breath, inventorying the quiet.</p><p>The sky has been traded for a ceiling of ash</p><p>even stars refuse to remember my name.</p><p><br/></p><p>There are rooms inside me I dare not enter</p><p>furniture wrapped in dust, photographs burned at the edges.</p><p>When I whisper to the past it answers in riddles,</p><p>and the riddles taste like rust on my tongue.</p><p><br/></p><p>My shadow has learned to move without me,</p><p>tracing memories that flare and die like dying lamps.</p><p>I call out, the sound slaps the walls and returns dulled,</p><p>a coin thrown into a well that has no bottom.</p><p><br/></p><p>Every compass I carry is a joke:</p><p>north points to an old regret, east to a promise I never kept.</p><p>Maps are charred confessions; the roads are hungry mouths.</p><p>I fold directions into prayers and burn them anyway.</p><p><br/></p><p>Bodies of could-have-beens litter the roadside </p><p>friends, names, versions of love that walked away.</p><p>I gather them like stones and build a cairn of failures,</p><p>then crouch inside it until my hands forget warmth.</p><p><br/></p><p>The moon visits like a spy, pale and unimpressed,</p><p>watching me rearrange grief into small, tidy piles.</p><p>I try to stitch myself together with thread from other lives,</p><p>but the fabric rejects foreign stitches and unravels.</p><p><br/></p><p>Sometimes I find a face in the glass not mine, not whole </p><p>eyes like closed doors, a mouth that opens with a lie.</p><p>I knock until my knuckles splinter; the house never answers.</p><p>The light that slips under the door is always someone else’s.</p><p><br/></p><p>I learn to measure days by the weight of silence,</p><p>counting hours in the hush between breath and regret.</p><p>Hope, when it comes, is a stranger who stays one night too long,</p><p>stealing the sheets and leaving the window open.</p><p><br/></p><p>There is a place where lost things go to rot and grow into thorns;</p><p>I have planted my hands there, dug until calluses bled.</p><p>Roots took hold where I once hoped roses would,</p><p>and the thorns learned my name, sharp and exact.</p><p><br/></p><p>I am tired of inventing exits that lead to alleys,</p><p>of finding doors that open onto more walls.</p><p>If being lost is a punishment, I have served my sentence well </p><p>my sentence is unending, my parole a rumor.</p><p><br/></p><p>Still, sometimes in the deepest dark a shape passes:</p><p>not salvation, not solace only the shape of a step.</p><p>I follow anyway, because following is what I know,</p><p>and failing to move feels like agreeing to disappear.</p>
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