I Refuse To Trade My Pulse For Their Applause Poem by Mohammad Younus

I refuse to trade my pulse for their applause,
to let their hollow scripts carve grooves in my bones.
No marionette, I—no wooden grin nailed to their stage,
no echo rehearsed in the cavern of their cravings.

Shall I bow to the algorithm's hum,
let its neon tide bleach my shadow to ash?
No. Let their currencies of like and follow crumble—
I am no coin for their marketplace of masks.

We are not cut from the same trembling cloth,
but constellations stitched by a fiercer fire.
Each breath, a rebellion; each heartbeat, a hymn—
a rhythm no metronome of trends can tame.

I am a thread, yes—but spun from supernovas,
dyed in the ink of ancestral dreams.
This body? A vessel—a fleeting loom
where galaxies weave their stubborn song.

And you—you are no mere spectator.
Your veins hum the same electric psalm:
the falcon's cry tearing through the dawn,
the river's cursive etched on ancient stone,
the lichen's slow prayer on cathedral oak,
the magma's hymn beneath the crust of the civilized.

They call it inert—this rock, this dust.
Fools. Even silence thrums with memory.
The boulder cradles eons in its granite palm;
the comet's tail inscribes secrets in a forgotten tongue.

We are not fragments—we are fractals,
each cell a mirror of the infinite loom.
The cosmos is no mere thread;
it is the thread, unraveling and rebraiding
through our breath, the beetle's iridescent shell,
the wind's scream that wears mountains to sand.

So let their strings snap. Let their stages rot.
I will keep my pulse wild, my song untranslatable—
a discordant note in their sterile symphony,
a wildfire in their walled garden of plastic blooms.

—MyKoul