We cannot allow these promises,
Of better tomorrows,
To be false.
The utopias we dreamed of,
Must be fought for.
Bled for.
Yet we are already bleeding so heavily.
Struggling to stand,
From blood loss.
Knees trembling.
Teeth bared in crimson stained defiance.
Never go down easy;
An early lesson –
Learned in the savageries of youth.
Brutal Calculus,
On full display.
Survival of the fittest.
Evolutionary tragedies.
What could have been saviours,
Great minds.
Trapped in poverty.
Dysfunction.
Abuse.
Eating dirt,
Instead.
This resilience,
& grit?
Came from a thousand flesh wounds.
The need to persist.
To survive.
Fighting for each dawn,
Like a rabid beast.
Forgetting our logic,
In our frenzies of blood.
Meat.
A sacred thing.
My hunger ebbing,
Flowing.
The Infinite Hunger,
Eclipsing it all in exponents of affect.
Hard Knuckle Tactics.
Old brutalities,
This for that.
I’ve thrown too many punches,
Died ten thousand times,
In my dreams.
Was damned,
You see.
Outcast,
Pariah.
Infamous,
Hated by the majority.
A dominant neurotypical mass.
Weirdoes –
That see in longsighted scales,
At scales of planets,
Are to be shunned.
Here,
Take this crowbar.
Break me with it.
When is any pain,
Good pain?
Do we cut symbols in our flesh,
Just to refocus?
To numb the screaming traumas.
Standing between us,
& martyrdom.
Self sacrifice towards the realities,
We were promised.
The same things we want to promise,
To our own.
Nobody will ever hate me,
More than myself.
Long festering flaw,
Yet one that serves a purpose.
Can look at those who hate me,
In the eye.
Cackle madly,
At their vitriol.
Trying my very best –
To kill with kindness.
They can never kill me.
That’s my own right,
After all,
A gift to be savored.
Is it ironic?
That a creature who wishes for death,
Is also extremely hard to kill?
Refusing to die,
After being a soldier of misfortune,
For the duration of a lifetime.
The Blood Curse drinking my luck,
Into negatives.
Why endure?
What honor is left,
In fighting a cruel world?
One that wants us dead,
Almost as much as we do.
This blood,
Soaks my bones.
Aye.
We stand,
Barely if we must.
Because sometimes it’s that –
Or not at all.
We can die soon enough.
But if we’re not going to fight,
For ourselves.
We damn well should fight,
For them.
The poor bastards we leave behind.
Ragged,
Tattered,
At times flayed to the bone.
Blood pressures dropping.
We’ve stapled ourselves together,
A hundred times.
Picking rocks from bloodied wounds.
This is a fortitude,
We must gift onwards.
Can rally me ragged –
Because some of us?
That’s what we’re good for.
Taking blow after blow,
In hopes of a hundred futures.
In hopes;.
That they’ll have better lives than ours.
Eating Dirt.
