Writing · Spoken word
What We Allow
On complicity and silence — how the things we let slide define us as much as the things we do.
A tree doesn't ask who's gonna sit in its shade,
It just grows, slow – deliberate, unafraid,
Pushing against stone not because it was told,
But because that's what it was meant to hold,
We live in a world that applauds the shortcut,
The version with the smile, but none of the gut,
The version that is the easiest to love,
That never asks more than what's it's comfortable of,
We laugh at the joke before we know where it lands,
We watch a friend fall and dust off our hands,
We bury it in silence, we bury it in jokes,
We call it loyalty while somebody chokes.
Not enough people talk about the ones who stood by,
The ones who saw it coming and perfected the lie,
"I didn't want to cause a scene, didn't want to be the one,"
As if watching something break isn't something you've done.
We looked away and called it not our place to know,
What we allow is the silence we let grow,
We clapped along before we felt it hit the crowd,
What we allow is the joke that got too loud,
We said "not my problem" till it came around,
What we allow is the hand that let her drown,
We told ourselves it's complicated, then stood down,
What we allow is how a good thing hits the ground,
Every chased cloud, every drink to numb the signs,
Every borrowed ID just to act like you were fine,
Every body treated like a conquest, not a soul,
Every truth swallowed just to keep the peace whole,
A seed doesn't grow from the soil that was comfortable,
It grows from the broken ground: the improbable,
The dark before the root finds something to hold,
We were handed that chance – we let it turn to mold,
You can't plant anything when your hands only take,
The ground remembers every promise that you break,
Don't just stand aside and watch the world go solemn,
We're either part of the solution or part of the problem,
Verbatim. Please don’t reproduce without credit.