The deadliest power

There are parts of me most will never meet.

A shadowed river beneath the soft earth,

quiet until the ground splits and the water rises.

I have learned to carry it carefully,

to walk with its weight balanced in my chest,

the way you cradle a fragile, wild thing

that could bite through bone if you let it loose.

Sometimes I think of what I could do

if I stopped choosing peace.

The precision of it frightens people...

not because I would lash out blindly,

but because I would not.

Like the krait, silent in its coil,

or the black mamba that strikes only once

and leaves its mark forever.

There is nothing messy about this part of me.

It knows exactly where to land the blow.

I once told my mother about it..

about the darkness I keep folded

between my ribs,

how sharp it could become

if I allowed it to breathe.

She looked at me for a long time,

her silence thick enough to feel.

And then she said softly,

“That’s the part of you that scares me.”

But she did not pull away.

She understands.

She knows that the deadliest power

is not in venom itself

but in choosing not to release it.

I do not deny this darkness.

I have needed it to survive.

I have drowned pieces of myself

to keep the rest alive.

I have killed off old versions of me

that begged for mercy in the wrong hands.

That part of me, the one that remembers

every betrayal, every wound left open..

it waits quietly in the hollow between heartbeats.

Not out of hunger.

Not out of rage.

But because I taught it to stay still

until there is truly no other way.

There is strength in walking away

when the venom hums under your skin.

There is grace in silence

when your hands ache for reckoning.

I have learned to let others believe

they have escaped my fire,

when in truth I simply refused

to burn myself to touch them.

I am not harmless.

But I am deliberate.

And in a world that feeds on chaos,

that is what unsettles them most..

that I could end something cleanly,

but choose instead to carry my power

like a closed fist in my pocket,

knowing it is there,

knowing I do not need to open it

to prove I can.