Title: The Price Of Silence Poem by ashok jadhav

(The speaker stands in a dimly lit space, hands trembling, voice alternating between anger, despair, and self-reproach. They speak as if confessing to someone—or to themselves.)
Monologue:
How did it come to this?
I swore… I swore I would never bend.
I swore I would never sell my soul for comfort, for power, for safety.
And yet… here I am.
A liar. A traitor.
A shadow of the person I promised I'd be.
It started small, just a compromise…
"Just this once, " I told myself.
A lie here, a shortcut there.
And slowly… slowly… I became someone I do not recognize.
Every decision, every word, every handshake…
tainted with the knowledge that I have sold pieces of myself.
And now… I look at the faces of those I care about,
and I wonder… do they see me?
Or do they see the mask I've created to hide the rot inside?
I am living a lie, and the truth… the truth is suffocating me.
I thought I could justify it, excuse it…
But every night, every quiet moment,
the corruption whispers, and I hear it loud and clear: you are complicit, you are stained, you are nothing.
I wanted to do right.
I wanted to hold on to who I was.
But the world… the world demanded compromise,
and I… I could not resist.
And now, I am trapped in the prison I built for myself,
haunted by the knowledge that integrity… integrity is gone.
(Pauses, voice softening, almost a whisper, trembling with shame.)
Is there redemption? Can I undo what I've done?
Or is this… is this who I am now, forever?
A man sold to his own weakness.
(The speaker sinks to the ground, head in hands, crushed by the weight of moral failure.)