Taking Someone's Life
2024
Can you imagine taking someone’s life
fostered from the minerals of this earth
birthed through canals of red hot flesh
held against milk-warm breasts
Imagine the generations of women and
men still alive in the thickness of their blood
See the women tightening their corsets against
the morning light; watch the men drive scythes
across summer’s grasses; see hands slit the tender
throats of sheep and goats, feel the iron trickle. Meet
those who always had the last word; meet those who
had the best stories, those who tried and never fit in.
See the priests breaking bread and full mouths rudely laughing,
See the children playing hide and seek behind cotton sheets
in gardens; see many famines, see wars. See two perfect ten
thousand year old sets of footprints in the sand on a lakeshore,
fossilized — see more hands, calloused, holding torches
and painting the rock face coming eerily alive at night.
Imagine taking the life of someone in whose veins still
linger the lips humming lullabies in languages long lost and
the hands crafting beds from soft furs and hands
tying shut pouches of dried mushrooms and bringing
fire to life — see life’s spark mutating and morphing
through long, long rivers of genes, see genes evolving —
See ribs cages — not ours — heaving with the moist heat
of life; see soft egg shells cracking; see gills filtering
and underwater roots taking a hold of mire and rot; see
fungi and algae collide, see symbiosis emerge; see us
inventing the very first eyes, see the insane layer cake of
quadrillions of consciousnesses possibly exploding
from a meteor hitting this planet — see this absurdly
beautiful sci fi planet
Can you imagine taking this very life
of some other one
— willingly —
When they have come from so
far
away
and have only a few glimpses
to live,
to be now—