Being loud and still unheard is the first, quietly painful paradox in Luca Flauto's "XVIII - The chaos in the vase." The speaker screams, yet "no one could hear me," and feels "little / sorrounded by giants." The voice fades "with the hope of keeping everything / around my gravity." Gravity here does double duty. It is the pull that holds things together, and it is also seriousness, weight. From the opening lines, the speaker is trying to stay centered while everything larger than them pulls away.
The poem then turns to one extended metaphor. The speaker walks "on a thin thread," balancing "an heavy vase / on top of my head." It is a tightrope act and a test of endurance at once, and the poem lets time pass inside it: "The joy to restart in front of me, / the mistakes behind." The speaker is caught between a hopeful future and a regretted past, in "an empty room where I look at my emotions." The most telling line is also the simplest: "The more I walked, / the more the vase pushed on my head." Progress does not lighten the load. Moving forward only makes the weight felt more.
The sound of the poem changes as the pressure builds. "My negativities are cradling me, / in a melancholic waltz" is an odd, tender image, because the thing that threatens the speaker is also rocking them. A waltz on a thin thread suggests a rhythm that is soothing and dangerous together. Then comes the title image, "the chaos in the vase, / banging louder each moment." A vase is meant to hold something ordered, like water or flowers, so chaos inside it is a small shock. The noise also echoes the opening. The scream no one could hear has moved indoors, into the speaker's own head, where it cannot be ignored.
Formally, the poem is free verse. It has no regular rhyme or meter, and its short lines follow the pace of plain speech and hesitation. Stanzas vary in length, and enjambment such as "holding an heavy vase / on top of my head" lets a line hang before its meaning lands. The break comes with a single word, "Suddenly," and the stanza that follows spills over, ending with a stark comparison: the burden was something "I deeply hated / and took care of either, / as a toxic relationship destroys a soul." The phrasing is slightly rough, but the feeling is exact. The speaker both resented and tended the weight, and the poem does not pretend that is simple.
What follows is aftermath, not triumph. "The walk came to an end," and the work is to "pick up every sharply piece / from the ruins of that room." The empty room has become ruins, but the speaker is no longer only watching their emotions from a distance. They are handling them, piece by piece. Relief arrives in small, physical details: "a subtle smile is kissing / my pale face," the same face "that cried warm tears." The rainbow simile ("like a rainbow paints the valley / after the rain") is familiar, but it fits a poem that has stayed so long in the storm.
The final stanza reframes everything. "Through the crowd" now replaces the earlier giants, so the speaker has rejoined other people. They find "the vase again, / the burden I saw breaking," and then the key admission: "that vase is me." The weight they carried, hated and protected was themselves. The closing vow, "I would never shatter myself again," reads as hope and resolve, though the poem leaves open whether that promise can be kept.
The poem's significance lies in this late turn. A long metaphor about carrying a burden becomes a statement about self-acceptance, and it makes sense of the earlier contradictions: the hatred and the care, the scream that no one heard, the chaos that stayed inside. For student readers, it offers a clear model of how a single image, sustained and then redefined, can carry an emotional journey from silence through collapse to something like peace.