Yesterday was a poem. This is it's story:

Chance didn’t knock. It came flying through like a riot cop’s boot, smashing straight through the door of Jamal’s life.

He’d been sitting on the sagging sofa, half-listening to the thud-thud of bass from a neighbour’s sound system upstairs, half-watching the condensation crawl down the inside of the living room window. Damp place. Damp dreams. The estate was full of them, wasted wishes hung out to dry on washing lines that never saw sun. His mum always said to play it safe. Stack hours at the supermarket, keep your head down, don’t get involved.

But life? Life didn’t want safe. It wanted war.

Jamal had always felt like a loaded question in a room full of answers to a different question. Teachers told him to stick to the plan: college, job, maybe a side hustle. Something pleasantly beige. Something easy to bury yourself in. But he wasn’t built for beige. Not with the way his chest pounded whenever he heard a beat, not with the bars that spilled out of his head in the middle of the night like they had somewhere to be.

He remembered one night clearly.

Bedside clock glowing 3:07am. His little sister breathing soft in the next room. His pen moving in rhythm with the leaky tap over the old, Victorian sink. No light except the flicker of a dying bulb. He wasn’t writing lyrics, he was dragging truth out of the dark. Every line cost him. Every verse tasted like sweat and metal and hope.

The never-silent chorus of his life said, “Don’t dream too loud. Don’t ask for more.” The world whispered it through endless red, overdue bills, through the way his manager looked past him like he wasn’t even there, like he was already halfway out the door.

But Jamal had seen a gap in the clouds once. A sliver-blue of sky on a grey day. No golden gate, no invitation, just that beat, that one beat that landed in his chest and said, Now.

He started spitting rhymes at the park. Phone in hand, cold wind on his back, mates pulling faces behind him. Some laughed. Some nodded. One of them, Marcus, filmed it and uploaded it with: “Estate Heat. No Gas Needed. LMFAO”

It blew up.

The comments weren’t all good. Some were brutal. Others called him fake. But Jamal read them all. Every “no” he took in like fuel. Turned rejection into rhythm, sneers into syllables. What they didn’t get was, he wasn’t rapping to be famous. He was rapping to breathe. To live.

He started showing up at open mics. First, he stood frozen. Then, he spoke, and something inside broke open. His voice cracked, sure. But the fire? That stayed. Even when no one clapped. Even when a bouncer told him he wasn’t “what the crowd was looking for.”

Didn’t matter.

He kept climbing. Fingers bloodied on the industry walls, nails chipped from grabbing chances that slipped. It wasn’t flexing, it was fighting. Every song was a round in the ring. Every set a blow to the idea that he was just another name lost in the estate’s sinking well of obscurity.

He didn’t know if he’d make it. Not really.

But what he did know was this: he’d rather fall face-first chasing the light than rot quietly in the shadows of someone else’s idea of what his life should be.

So when the call came, from a small-time producer who’d seen one of his videos and wanted him in the studio,Jamal didn’t pause. Didn’t ask how. Didn’t worry about bus fare or fear or failure.

He packed his lyrics, kissed his mum’s cheek, and left.

Door swinging shut behind him.

No regrets. No Returns.