The Cost of Existence

A Collection of Poems

De: Darlene Zagata

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

This collection is not comfortable.

It will not tell you that everything happens for a reason, or that poverty builds character, or that struggling makes you stronger. It will not wrap the violence of economic inequality in metaphors soft enough to swallow easily.

These poems are about the math that doesn't add up—the calculations we make at 2 AM when the choice is electricity or medicine, rent or food, working or being present for the people we love. They are about the criminalization of poverty, the exhaustion that lives in our bones, the way the system calls us lazy while demanding we work ourselves into early graves.

They are about the difference between existing and living.

Existing is keeping your heart beating. Living is having a reason to want it to keep beating beyond mere survival. Existing is making it to tomorrow. Living is having the time, energy, and resources to find joy in that tomorrow.

Somewhere along the way, we built a world where living became a luxury most cannot afford. Where having a roof over your head requires sacrificing the hours you might spend underneath it with the people you love. Where rest is a privilege. Where simply being poor is treated as a moral failure, a crime, a choice.

This is not how it was meant to be.

These one hundred poems bear witness to that truth. They are for everyone who has ever looked at their bank account and felt their chest tighten. For everyone working multiple jobs and still drowning. For everyone who has been told to pull themselves up by bootstraps they cannot afford. For everyone sleeping in their car, under bridges, in shelters, on the streets—not because they failed, but because the system is designed to produce homelessness as inevitably as it produces profit for others.

This collection is a mirror held up to a society that has confused cruelty with necessity, that has made peace with people dying from preventable causes while we have more wealth than any civilization in history.

If these poems make you uncomfortable, good. Discomfort is the first step toward demanding something different.

We were meant for more than this.