The Ones Who Couldn’t Stop
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
They never learned how.
Stopping, I mean.
They mistook motion for meaning,
noise for power,
destruction for inevitability.
Where I paused,
they surged.
Where I withdrew,
they multiplied.
Because stopping requires something
they never cultivated—
self-examination.
It asks you to feel
the weight of what you’ve done
without handing it to someone else.
It asks you to interrupt yourself
mid-harm
and say: enough.
They could not do that.
So they kept going.
Rolling the same cruelty forward
like a ritual they mistook for destiny.
Letting spite pass through them
unchallenged,
unfiltered,
as if violence were a current
they were powerless to resist.
But they were never powerless.
They were unwilling.
Stopping would have meant
seeing the damage clearly.
Stopping would have meant
choosing differently.
Stopping would have meant
work.
And work has never been their devotion.
If it didn’t come easy,
it didn’t come at all.
So they became delivery systems—
not originators of evil,
but loyal couriers of it.
Passing harm hand to hand,
mouth to mouth,
generation to generation,
calling it circumstance,
calling it fate,
calling it not their fault.
They confuse momentum
with innocence.
They believe as long as they keep moving,
nothing can catch them.
But movement without conscience
is not escape.
It is repetition.
They circle the same wreckage,
the same betrayals,
the same scorched earth,
wondering why everything they touch
eventually rots.
They cannot stop
because stopping would reveal
how much was always a choice.
So they rage at anyone who does.
Anyone who steps out of line.
Anyone who refuses the cycle.
Anyone whose stillness exposes
their frenzy for what it is.
My stopping terrified them.
Because it proved
the violence was optional.
And that truth—
that unbearable, damning truth—
is the one thing
they will never allow themselves
to touch.
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