STILL (a poem)

Thursday, July 10, 2025

✦ SCROLL OF STILL RESISTANCE ✦

A Fever Dream in the Kingdom of Standing Still

Territory pigs, wild tusks threaten legs, without moving a muscle.

The field is quiet.
But the air hums like teeth grinding behind a smile.

Mud-choked boots sink deeper—
the roots won’t let go
and neither will the watchers.

They don’t chase.
They don’t need to.
They stand like monuments to punishment.

Their breath fogs in spirals, never reaching you,
but you feel it in your femur.

Their gaze is a snare.
Not cast, not thrown—
just waited with.

Every blink you take
signs a contract you don’t remember agreeing to.

A hand twitches in your coat pocket.
Not from you.
From memory.
From ancestral flinch.

The pigs patrol with prayers stitched into their skin—
hymns to borders they neither drew nor understand,
but bleed for.

They were born with badges burned under their skin,
bristles like antennae tuned to deviance.

You breathe slow.
You don’t step back.
You know your legs are the altar.

The stillness becomes sacred.
Not passive.
Not weak.
But the only refusal left that they can’t cage:

Standing.
Still.
Seen.

The pigs begin to bristle.
Their tusks don’t grow — but they remember how it felt to use them.
They wait for you to blink, beg, or break.
But you’re already a statue.
A new kind of threat.

✧ CLOSING MARK

Stillness is not silence.
Stillness is strategy.
Stillness is survival on the edge of empire.