All red eyes speak the same story
Of minuscule tales of epic destruction
A pain that’s acquired in the very womb
And carries to the offspring’s grave.
The redness doesn’t wash
With the nurse’s hand
Neither does the life
Cut off with the umbilical cord.
I haven't found a child who wasn’t
A sequel to its parent’s story
Like flames sinking into themselves
We go back to genetic wiring.
Like a father dying in the age of cholera
Giving birth to a doctor, or killer
Bidding farewell to the disaster
Or the vessel of disaster itself.
Like a mother coming home late
Drunk. And the son beating his wife
Later in the bed. Gifts of the unknown?
No, there is a pattern here.
We’re all sending messages into future
Our ciphers will be deciphered
In the unsettled subconscious of impressionable minds. Don’t you see the pattern?
Never will they see an open sky
Those whose siblings got caught in storms
Never will they turn fish into the water
Those whose uncles drowned themselves.
You will carry the fear of your jilted mother’s pain
All your life: in not just your heart but your body
Your hormones will turn against your eyes
When a pleasant man walks by.
You will look inward when pre-pubescent girls
Smile at you from behind their raffle sheets
And think of your father, in a church
Using hands meant for prayers in twisted positions.
Why bring life in a lie
That doesn’t value purity?
Where loneliness sells faster than drugs
And hysteria darkens faster than nights.
And if it just so happens
That the wounds of your origins
Have been sewn long before
One cut after the other
And you have come into the world
Of an unfettered life of unhurt loins.
If it just so happens that you’re unscarred
Naked and small and only of yourself
In the world.
If it just so happens
That the womb you came from
Was healthy both in body and mind
Then stop it right there.
Protect:
Not just you but the
World from more like you.
For sum of all the labour
Is anguish and nothing more.
Enough with the offspring!
Either end a vicious cycle
Or end on a high.