On the roof, he angles the black glass.
He just smuggled the panels in,
Wrapped inside the wool like contraband where the channels end.
He wipes the gray dust from the photovoltaic cells,
Praying the sun remains impartial,
To feed the battery, to feed the compressor,
And keep the hum alive beneath the pressure.
He prays for the freeze, his religion—Temperature.
Between two and eight degrees,
Guarding dormant ghosts of immunity
While the power line wheezes.
Down the street, the earth is fresh over his cousin,
Whose legs withered before his lungs
A twisted architecture of bone and atrophy.
The cause—
A guest from a history book to the rest of the world,
But here, it is the silence in the playground.
His thoughts wander to years ago,
When he woke to thunder made of steel,
A metal rain on wounds that would not heal.
His mother whispered,
"Don't worry child, the sound is over there. It tears the flesh of children, not my own.
So you are safe beneath this ruined stone.
Here is water, free from blight, A jewel I guarded through the night. The devil inside the water loses today. Wipe the dust, and let us pray."
But now he knows
The sound that cracked the sky back then was not a bomb,
But a champagne cork popped in a distant calm.
It echoed when he sought to break his generation's cage:
A scholarship—
A door that swung ajar.
In a far place across the peaceful sea,
His mother's tears, a currency of grace,
Lit fragile hope across his weary face.
Meanwhile, far across that same peaceful sea,
A man sat idle, steeped in dark conspiracy.
He'd shunned the schools, ignored the social worker's plea,
Convinced the system was a plot, a globalist decree.
But as the years ticked by, he found himself without a trade,
Jobless and bitter in the bed that he had made.
He saw the scholar from afar, who'd come to take a space,
And cursed his screen for the world to see:
"This foreigner steals the future meant for me!"
He typed in rage, a victim of his self-inflicted plight—
"A corrupted system! It isn't fair or right!"
A patriot replied:
"The fight is on!
You speak the truth! We'll help you take a stand!
Stop aid to that forsaken, cursed land!
Deport the ones whose homes we helped erase,
But keep the cobalt for my new phone case."
He remembers how he returned,
Deported but determined,
To teach the silenced what they dared not say.
But the old regime could not abide the light,
So they sent for him.
The car, unmarked and white.
In freezing rooms where meat was hung,
Detained in a ghost house, his fate unknown,
The seeds he'd scattered had already grown.
They broke his body, but his cause found tongue.
His name became a banner and a prayer
That broke and freed the poisoned air.
The regime fell, a victory hard-won—
But new betrayers rose with the sun.
Back on the roof,
He eats his morning ful from a battered tin bowl.
The beans are brown and tepid,
Stripped of the white salt of cheese,
Devoid of the golden slick of sesame oil.
It is just fuel.
It tastes like waiting.
Back across the peaceful sea,
When the online cheers died down and the immigrant was gone,
The man still had no job in the quiet dawn.
Feeling left behind as his echo chamber cooled,
He swallowed his pride and finally got schooled.
He joined the adult classes he'd once fiercely defied,
And now the lighting is calibrated perfectly.
The Guy stands on a circular red rug,
Wearing a headset that curls against his jaw like a sleek vine.
He clicks a remote; a slide appears behind him.
The word RESILIENCE in sans-serif font,
Over a stock photo of a mountain climber.
He pauses for effect, looking at the silent auditorium.
He speaks of the years he spent "questioning the truth,"
How the establishment had "misguided" his youth.
He speaks of the courage it took to walk into adult ed,
A grown man sitting at a desk where teenagers had bled.
He speaks of the panic attacks during open-book finals,
The way the math equations blurred at the edges.
Back in the zone, the inverter makes a sickly clicking sound.
The man with the ful holds his breath.
If the cold chain breaks, the vials become water.
He thinks of his other cousin, the one with the fever,
And how "preventable" is the most violent word in the dictionary.
He checks the wires, twisted together with tape and hope,
While the mortar shells argue in the distance,
Rearranging the geography of the neighborhood.
The man on the stage exhales, a practiced vulnerability.
"But I kept going,"
he says, his voice cracking gently.
"I faced my demons. I got my certificate."
The audience nods, a sea of empathetic shadows.
Later, he will go home to a climate-controlled living room,
And stand before the wall where the light hits just right.
He will look at the paper:
Heavy cardstock, embossed seal, mahogany frame.
He will dust the glass with a microfiber cloth,
Staring at his name in calligraphy,
Proof that he survived the consequences of his own mind.
While far away,
Under a relentless and uncaring sun,
A man guards the cold,
And eats his beans alone.