They Made Me Their Mirror

Truth buried beneath polished lies.

They Made Me Their Mirror

They said silence was safety,
wrapped it in smiles and nods,
laced it with hollow promises
and the sharp edge of implication.
I have carried their secrets
like rusted daggers in my spine,
each story a weight,
each truth a scream I swallowed
so they could wear white in public
while soaking their hands in shadows.

You don’t know the things I’ve seen—
the crooked negotiations behind closed doors,
the mouths that speak virtue by day
and drip venom by dusk.
One swore they were building a better world
while blackmailing a man out of his name.
Another cried tears for a stranger’s pain
but laughed while turning the screws
on someone they owed mercy.
They patted me on the back,
called me paranoid, bitter,
as they burned the evidence
and buried it under staged applause.

They twist perception like glass—
fragile, sharp, and shimmering with false light.
They feed lies to anyone who listens,
casting themselves as heroes in stories
they broke with their own hands.
And when the truth came close to clawing out,
they smeared my name in the mud
they created
and told the world it was mine.

But I have not broken.
My silence was never consent.
It was survival.
It was calculation.
It was watching the jackals
circle each other long enough
to know they’ll tear one another apart eventually.

You want to know what I am?
I am not the villain they fear I’ll become.
I am the one who remembers.
The one who sees.
The one who still walks with a spine upright,
unlike those who bend themselves
into palatable shapes for praise.

There is a kind of power
in not needing to lie.
In not carving masks from your own face
just to be adored.
I have been dragged through their trenches
and came out clean because I never played their game.
Let them feast on each other’s deceit.
Let them drown in the reflections
of the monsters they pretend not to be.

I still have my name.
I still have my truth.
And unlike theirs,
mine does not rot in the light.