There Is No Cure For The Human Condition
We are born with our hands already shaking,
as if the body remembers a future it does not want.
We learn the word enemy before we learn the word neighbor,
learn how to clench our teeth around fear
and call it certainty.
In the streets, men we do not know
walk with their faces erased,
masks where mouths should be,
guns resting against their ribs
like extra bones grown from rage.
They move through crowds as if through tall grass,
leaving a trail of fallen stems.
Power sits in high rooms with polished tables,
its voice calm, its eyes unblinking.
The mind behind it is cracked like old porcelain,
sealed with slogans,
stuffed with flags and prayers and applause.
No one checks the fractures.
No one asks what leaks through.
We pass one another like loaded weapons,
safety off,
waiting for the smallest spark:
a word, a color, a border, a god.
We tell ourselves we are righteous,
and righteousness becomes a knife.
And when the killing grows tired,
when the earth is heavy with bodies,
we invent quieter ends—
a breath that carries fever,
a button that turns cities into shadows,
a sky that rains fire and calls it defense.
There is no cure for the human condition.
Only this:
we keep walking into one another’s darkness
with our hands raised,
as if surrender were the same as love,
as if the world could still be saved
by the simple act
of not pulling the trigger.
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