City Without Doors: A Hymn for the Invisibly Awake #poetry #paris

I

birthed myself in the thick stew of sirens and sandalwood,
spit into a basin made of noise and neon,
they called it culture—
I called it collision.
and as for peace—
you want the truth?
it was misplaced between bus exhaust and backhanded blessings.

peace?
a correction, yes—file it under fiction,
under “P” between “paranoia” and “panopticon.”
you see,
this pot boiled
and boiled
and boiled
until skin peeled off the soul.
you stood there once too, didn’t you?
mouth ajar at the architecture of ache,
thinking,
damn, what a beautiful cage.

and still
the people—
small-boned architects of invisible sanctuaries
erected rooms in the hollows of crosswalks,
behind the silence between subway stops,
in their eyes:
a wallpaper of memories not meant for this century.
they built with breath,
with micro-pauses in small talk,
with shoulder shrugs and
chewed pencil erasers.

you walked among them.
or were you one of them?
one of us?
socially adapted like a chameleon addicted to its own disguise.
functionally lost, delightfully numb.
this city gifted you camouflage and called it freedom,
but what did it steal when you weren’t looking?
answer me.
don’t lie.

II

sometimes I asked the sky—
where do the truly free go when the pavement won't let go of their feet?
do they float above traffic jams and Tinder dates,
or do they smuggle themselves into basements and bookshelves?
and how many of them survive the crush
of expectations served with bitter masala tea at the corner shop?
how many still bloom in this oxygen-deprived paradise?

the city
doesn’t chew you whole—
no.
it marinates you in options until
you forget your original recipe.

and I—
I was always asking myself:
at what cost, darling?
is that chandelier worth the chain?
is that polished opinion worth the rust on my spirit?
am I willing?
really willing?
to introduce a new god
to the pantheon of my routine.

but still—
I saw them.
the ones who didn’t look like they were running,
but weren’t exactly walking either.
drifting.
blurred silhouettes in the crowd’s soup.
fitting in
until the seams tore under the breath of memory.

were they hiding?
or had the city sculpted them into statues with pulse?
had the crowd baptized them or erased them?

III

me?
I took my maximum dose.
any more would have shattered me like a glass under too much bass.
you understand that, right?
tell me you do.
you who also needed silence to scream.
you who saw color bleed from walls after 3 AM.
don’t pretend.

those stairs,
you know the ones—
spiraling like existential questions in old novels.
people find poetry in those stairs.
me?
I found vertigo.
I endured them the way a moth endures a mirror.

and still,
they say:
“novels are novels,
life is life.”
yes—
but don’t both smell of ink and sweat?
aren’t both filled with dog-eared regrets?

I whispered to myself:
just two nights.
just two nights.
a mantra stitched from survival.
but it disappointed me, you know?
like a firecracker that promised sky
but gave only smoke.

IV

and I would not—
will not—
become like them.
no.

you and I,
we must not reduce ourselves to shapes
that fit the mold of resignation.
what else?
ah, yes:
those damned high curbs
built to keep hope from flowing into the gutter.
narrow staircases that say:
“Only the compliant shall pass.”
and the inconveniences!
like the fine print on promises.

but wait—
don’t look away now.
because here comes the confession
cloaked in glitter and grit:

we often spotlight the feast.
the wine, the velvet.
but what about the meal that spoiled halfway through
and we still ate it,
smiling politely?

yes—let us write
of how the real verified our dreams,
how grit sandpapered the gloss
right off our illusions.

and even then—
even then—
we did not dissolve into bitterness,
not entirely.

sure, some sadness brewed.
a dash of anger curled in the tea leaves.
but we learned, didn’t we?
how to hold paradox in our palms
without crushing it.

you and I,
we still build little rooms—
intimate, invisible—
in the noise.
we still ask too many questions.
we still love like spies.

and if that isn’t defiance,
then nothing is.