Nothing in Faryal Gohar's "Violence inside my head" is struck, smashed or shouted. The title promises a battle, but the poem delivers stillness: a speaker who looks around, finds nobody, cannot breathe and goes numb. The gap between that loud title and the hushed lines is the poem's central idea. The violence is entirely internal, and so is the answer to it, which is not a fight but a decision to "find peace in silence."
The opening sets up isolation in plain terms. "Today when I looked around, / There was no one who could be found" has the immediacy of a diary entry, and it is one of the few places where the poem rhymes properly (around/found). The next lines are the most interesting: "In this atmosphere full of air, / I couldn't breathe." The phrasing is slightly odd, since atmosphere and air are nearly the same thing, but the oddness works. The world is saturated with exactly what she needs, and none of it reaches her. Abundance all around, nothing available: that is a vivid picture of panic.
From here the poem lists symptoms rather than causes. Tears "rolled", "Everything went blank", the body "felt frozen and couldn't move." The verbs are passive, so things happen to the speaker. Tears roll without her crying them, and everything goes blank without her deciding it. Even her wish, "I wanted to cry all I want," trails off in a loose, spoken-sounding tense, as if she is too drained to polish it. The poem never says what hurt her. The only hint is "the echoes of past," and the text leaves it at that. What we can say is that memory is felt here as sound, something that bounces around and will not settle. That makes the final word, "silence," a precise opposite rather than a vague comfort.
Punctuation and rhyme add to the effect. Nearly every line ends in a comma, and the only full stop falls on the last word. Read aloud, the poem is almost one long sentence that never lets the speaker pause, which may well mirror the breathlessness she describes. After around/found, the rhyme dissolves into free verse, as though the form is losing its footing along with her. Near the end it returns: "fire red" and "in my head" chime. The sky's colour and the mind's turmoil share a sound, which quietly links the outer and inner worlds. That "evening sky coloured fire red" is the only colour in the poem, and it is the colour of burning, the one image that looks as violent as the title. Yet she looks at it and turns toward calm rather than being swallowed by it.
The last line carries the most weight. "I chose to find peace in silence" contains the first verb in which the speaker acts instead of enduring. After so much freezing and losing, agency finally arrives. "Find" also answers the second line, where no one "could be found." Nobody turns up, but peace does. And "silence" rhymes with nothing, so the poem ends where no sound comes back, which suits its subject.
Is that silence a triumph? A careful reader might notice that it resembles the earlier paralysis, since both involve stillness and nothing said. The difference the poem insists on is choice. The frozen body is something done to her, while the silence is something she takes up. That fragile distinction keeps the ending honest. There is no rescue and no cure, only a small act of self-possession.
That honesty is what makes the poem worth reading. It treats distress without spectacle, with no named cause, no villain and no dramatic event, and it trusts simple words to carry the weight. Many readers will recognise the feeling of being overwhelmed by something that cannot be seen from outside. By ending on a quiet choice rather than a solution, the poem suggests that peace can begin as an act of will, even while the noise in the head continues.