I walk through this world with a taste of rust,

Where profit is prayer and empathy dust.

The streets are sermons of silence and dread,

Preached by the living, mourned by the dead.

What godless machine dares spin this fate,

Where kindness starves and cowards legislate?

Their eyes are stone, their hands are still-

A choir of apathy, cold and shrill.

Yet I believe in those I’ve never known:

The unborn dreamers, the seeds unsown,

The dead who danced with paint and flame,

Whose beauty burned but earned no name.

I believe in the hands that will one day build

What we let rot, what we have killed.

In poems unwritten, and music unheard,

In hearts unspoiled by the world’s last word.

So let this be my quiet revolt

A vow in blood, a whisper, a bolt:

To serve no king, no creed of shame,

But art, and ghosts, and love unnamed.

E-mail: eva.koliadi@outlook.com