Few people would list hiding among their talents, yet C. J. Robinson's poem opens with that admission and takes its title from it. "Adept" is a word for expertise, the kind we attach to surgeons and craftspeople, and here it describes concealment. The first line, "Hiding was something I remained good at," carries a quiet sadness in the word "remained": the skill was not a one-off but something the speaker kept sharpening. "For years afterwards" suggests that something happened before, though the poem never says what. That silence is a kind of hiding too.
The first stanza sets up a neat symmetry: the speaker hides "from the things that I feared / And from the things that feared me." The second half is the unsettling one. Who would be afraid of the speaker? The poem doesn't answer, but the line hints that the speaker's hidden self was something others found threatening, or that the speaker believed they did. The second stanza raises the stakes. "My spirit was on lockdown" borrows the blunt, institutional vocabulary of prisons and emergencies, and the imprisonment is self-imposed. "Terrified" is also stronger than "feared." The line break holds back the reason, so the reader waits for "That I was terrified the world would see" in the same way the speaker waited.
Then comes "But," and the poem turns. Truth becomes "a flower that takes root quite well / In the darkest of places." The hiding place is no longer a tomb; it is soil. The understatement of "quite well" gives the image a calm, almost dry confidence. Truth is given "the / Virtue of patience," as though it were a person waiting for the right moment. The most interesting image is what makes it bloom: "The gleam of someone's eye." A flower would normally need sunlight, but the poem substitutes another person's gaze. Being seen was exactly what the speaker feared, and now it is what allows growth. The poem suggests that visibility is dangerous or nourishing depending on who is looking.
The single line that follows, "You cannot smother my truth without my consent," is the poem's boldest move. "Smother" echoes the darkness of the previous image, but the claim is that suffocation needs permission. That is a debatable idea, since it suggests the hiding was never purely something done to the speaker. It also changes the title. If the speaker chose what to conceal and when, then being "adept" at hiding is a form of control rather than defeat. The word "consent" has legal and bodily weight, and the poem never identifies the "you," so the reader can hear a person, a community, or the speaker's own old fear.
The form does a lot of the work. There is no rhyme and no regular meter; the voice is conversational, almost confessional. The long lines of the opening stanzas gradually give way to fragments. The last stanza is staged as a staircase: "And you / Quite plainly / No longer / Have my" and then, pushed far to the right, alone, "Consent." Each break is a step away from the left margin, as if the speaker is walking out of the room. "Have my" hangs in mid-air, so the reader must wait for the noun, and when it arrives it lands with finality. "Quite plainly" echoes the earlier "quite well," keeping the same measured, unshouted tone, and "plainly" is the opposite of hidden. The repeated "consent" frames the ending: the first time it states a principle, the second time it announces a decision.
What gives the poem its force is that it never names the truth being protected. A reader can fill that gap with their own secret, identity, or injury, and the poem still works. It also changes how we think about concealment. Hiding is treated as a skill that kept something alive, not as shame, and emerging is a matter of choice rather than exposure. Its restraint is part of its strength: it ends with one withdrawn word rather than an argument, and that makes the refusal feel complete.