Originally posted January 2019
I am a perpetrator of, a victim in cultural genocide. This is where many of my people linger attempting to savor the dying embers of a dream that slowly erodes into a nightmare. I am the living dead. Defeatism has breathed its rancid breath into this hollowed organ, extinguishing all hope and light. Restrained spasms, being dull imitations of once powerful motions, the weak rhythm barely keeps this vessel operational. Where is the growth? What may have caused this pseudo-death? What keeps this calloused black heart functioning enough to allow me to whisper?
When the rain never ceases, when the wind constantly blows, then you’ll understand what my existence has been like. When tears no longer etch a river bed down your face, but eat their way out of your very soul, then and only then will you grasp my pain. When sorrow, grief and deprivation are the tools manipulated to rebuild my core, being resurrected through confinement. My parents’ names being Chaos and Havoc; born into an illusion, then realizing that the reality has always been fantasy! Yet the only constant in my life is the excruciating tortures that both perspectives of reality present.
Here I strive, beating the vultures off of this corpse. Attempting to muzzle the jackals before they succeed in peeling the decomposed flesh from the arthritic skeleton that struggles to survive. Rigor mortis tries to complete my death, stagnation being a legacy readily accepted. Poverty is the paradise that many soldiers have died to protect. Broken promises, ignorance, and materials that were once labeled as fashion are the inheritances that these warriors live for. The inheritances that were left by the forefathers were dictated by gods to be scripted into legal books as case law. Guilty, is the verdict of living the identities that were coerced into our culture. We are being released from confinement to be shackled to a “Freedumb”, that only the restitution for ignorance will pay the price of redemption. I don’t seek sympathy from the unbelievers of this nefarious religion, for their compassion is stifling, choking hope and dependency from what remains of these wretched lungs. Equality, a phantom of ones’ dreams, hope and love, dies on the caked lips of praying mothers. Bowed heads of submission keeping our eyes from truly seeing what the world has to offer. I survive to change this. By speaking of this genocide through parched lips, words of this monstrous cycle withering off this bloated tongue, I confess my guilt, my truths of this culture. The pains of this one dying man, the pains of a dying culture, the Truth of a broken nation. But the question is, who listens to the dead when they speak, who hears my whispers?
