Silence Offensive

[Verse 1]
I never learned
How to meet your disrespect
With equal excavation
With that same sharp shovel
You swing at my soft spots
I learned something else
How to bear it
Shoulders up
Jaw loose
Eyes finding a safe place
On the wall behind you
I learned to move forward
Not because it felt heroic
But because stopping
Meant standing in the blast radius
Of every word you called “just a joke”
I learned to trim my answers
Cut the roots off my reasons
Limit explanations
To bite-size pieces
You could chew
Without ever tasting me
[Chorus]
So my silence
Became your offense
You heard an argument
Inside my quiet
You heard a mirror
And hated the reflection
So my silence offensive
Stood there between us
Like a locked door
I leaned against from my side
Pretending it was a wall
You built
[Verse 2]
You wanted a sparring partner
I brought open palms
You called it “too sensitive”
When I refused to bruise myself
To prove I was tough
You mistook my distance
For arrogance
My absence
For a posture
Instead of a bandage
Over a place
You kept pressing
Imagine rage
With nowhere to land
Circling my ribs
Like trapped birds
Beaks on bone
Wings on memories
Imagine how it calcifies
When every flare of anger
Gets filed under “overreacting”
Until I start apologizing
For the way my heart
Tries to defend its own pulse
[Bridge]
Created distance
Like a moat around my name
I built it quietly
Cup by cup
Late-night by late-night
Not to punish you
But to keep my voice
From drowning in your certainty
In that game
You kept score
By how loud you were
I kept score
By how much of myself
I could still recognize
When you left the room
[Chorus]
So my silence
Became your offense
You heard defiance
Where I was hiding
You heard attack
Where I was protecting
So my silence offensive
Stood between us
Not as a weapon
But a thin
Tired boundary
The last small country
Where I am allowed
To breathe
[Outro]
I never learned
How to meet your disrespect
With equal destruction
I learned survival instead
If my quiet
Cuts you now
Understand
It is the softest version
Of everything
You taught me
To swallow

Spoken-word over a slow, pulsing drone and distant percussion; intimate, close-mic male vocals, breaths left in. Sparse piano notes bloom on key phrases, with subtle reverse reverb sweeps to mark section changes. Energy rises from a simmer to a contained boil in the bridge, then drops back to a hushed, cutting final line., spoken word