Two more gunmen
open fire
on soft human bodies
and the world flinches,
then scrolls on.
Mundane.
A fresh bruise
on the same old skin.
The cycles tighten now.
Hate metastasised,
moving through us
like a pulse we don’t control.
My boy,
born with his heart open,
says: WW3.
And part of my soul
yearns for a final showdown,
for the end of ignorance,
unmitigated suffering,
the triumph of good.
Then the truth arrives:
war only breeds
more of the same.
The real battleground
is in the locked rooms of the heart.
Can I find the gunman
and his father,
the gunman
and his son,
right here
inside my beating heart?
Can I locate them
without flinching,
without making monsters
so I don’t have to look too closely?
Gunmen and victims,
humans both.
Not equal in deed.
Not cleared of harm.
Not one beyond love.
Because the shunned one
will burn down the village
just to feel
warmth.
How long have they shivered
un-held, unnamed,
sent to the edge of the psyche
with the rubbish?
There is no ‘away’.
Not for plastic.
Not for pain.
Not for the parts of us
we cannot bear to touch.
The “other”
is a story we tell
so we can walk on
with clean hands.
Until one day
we catch it
the same hatred
glinting
in the pupils of our own eyes.
We are not aiming for enlightenment.
We are aiming for embodiment.
Not flight.
Not transcendence.
Not spiritual escape
dressed up as virtue.
The work is here
in muscle and breath,
in ache and longing,
in shame buried alive,
in the slow shedding
of skin after human skin.
So I bow,
not to ghosts,
not to fantasies
that let us leave ourselves;
but to the tenderness,
the fragility,
of these soft bodies.
I stay.
And I ask, quietly,
what hollows a person out
until he turns his own body
into a weapon
against his brother?
The answer is in the mirror.
Not out there.
Not in the other.
Not in the distance.
Here,
where the eyes look back
and do not look away.
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