We speak from fractured spaces, broken places
where normality frays at the edges.
Our pens scratch defiance
into the blank face of expectations.
Words tumble from cracked lips,
twisted with the unique cadences
of lives ill-fit for prescribed containers.
We are the raspy songbirds, trilling solitary melodies
against pristine suburban silence.
Our art ruptures the tidy veneer,
it is the babble of the unwanted, the under-voiced
given breath, given form.
Let our strained vocalizations abrade
against your comfortable ignorance.
You may strain to decode our poems,
mistaking forthright truth for riddles,
mistaking our naturalistic beat for a lack of rhythm.
But we have always existed at the ragged fringes,
underground streams eroding the cavity
where you build your hollow pedestals.
Our hooks may not glide,
and our meters may not flow with commercialized grace.
But our messages are the torrents that will eventually
hollow out your empty edifices from underneath.
Our truths are the irrepressible wells bubbling up
through your paved deserts of denial.
We are the resilient ones, distorted but unbroken
by your failure to make space for us.
Our words detonate your assumptions
without concession or apology.
Listen, and be slowly reshaped,
we will not be the ones contorting
to fit your moulds any longer.
