The words rising in your head
right now —
the quiet voice
you call thinking —
listen to it
for one honest moment.
it was never only yours.
Before you could choose anything,
the words were already in you —
mother. no. mine. why.
Pressed in, mouth to ear,
by people who got them
the very same way,
from others
you will never meet.
You think
in a language
you did not invent.
every word in your mouth
was handed to you.
passed down a line of speakers
that runs back
past your parents,
past theirs —
ten thousand years
of borrowed breath.
you are the newest mouth
of a voice that began
long before you.
And a borrowed voice
can be steered.
The same channel
that lets a thought cross over —
can carry someone else's
straight into you.
A word repeated enough
stops sounding like a word.
It starts to sound
like truth.
Say the thing
a thousand mouths are saying,
and something in you
goes quiet —
the small part
that used to ask why.
A crowd does not argue.
It chants.
And for that moment
you are not thinking the thought.
it is thinking you.
a crowd is not
many voices.
it is one voice,
wearing many faces.
watch them fall into step —
one word, one beat,
one colour.
and the light that was yours
is in the rank now —
singing too.
Step back
far enough,
and the crowd
is a single body —
a mind made of
millions of minds,
thinking thoughts
no one of them
could think alone,
that no one of them
can see.
And yet.
If the voice in your head
was never only yours —
then you have never
once been alone in there.
Every word is a hand
reaching out of the dark,
from someone who wanted
to be understood
as badly as you do.
the chorus can
swallow you.
or it can
hold you.
same voices.
same web.
only the spacing changes.
stay yourself —
and let the others
reach you anyway.