James Mclain | + Follow Poet |
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These Are My Words Of Death

I never could live without leaving something behind—
a trail of words, a bottle of bourbon,
and now these reflections,
because we can’t escape the truth forever.

The world smells like a battlefield,
and though I was never afraid to stare death down,
this war we’ve made with ourselves is endless,
sprawling out over continents, seas, hearts.

Death, 
is a promise older than any law,
a consequence sharper than any bullet.
We’ve fed it, fattened it,
like cattle grazing on lies and silence.
State murder? Hell, legal or not, it’s all the same.

I’ve seen it, in the trenches,
in the execution yards,
in the cold, calculated way men sign death warrants.
The wealthy call it justice,
but the poor, we know it’s war.

War, war never leaves you.
It drags its knuckles through the streets,
ripping the skin of the earth,
cracking bones and breaking backs.
And yet, there’s no honor in this endless slaughter.

They called me a hero once,
but the taste of blood and gunpowder
never left my mouth.
I wonder now if it’s even worth it—
fighting, dying, for a world that’s so broken.

The oceans, they were blue once,
stretched out like a promise,
a horizon that never lied.
But they’re dying, James.
Choked on our sins, thick with oil,
bloated with plastic,
like a sailor drowning without a hand to pull him out.

We kill the earth with our greed,
and pretend it’ll heal like an old wound.
But the scars we leave,
they’re deeper than we can fix.

Then there’s the terror.
It slinks through crowded cities,
a shadow with a knife in its hand.
I fought in Spain, but this?
This is a different war, no trenches,
no front lines.

Just fear, endless fear,
and mothers holding their children too tight,
wondering if today’s the day.
Killings, beheadings, bombs—
it’s like the world decided to make Hell
a little closer to home.

And the earth shakes,
volcanoes spill their guts,
mountains once solid, now crumble.
Fellow poet's, we’ve poisoned the very ground we walk on.

The hurricanes, stronger every season,
howling like wolves at our doorstep.
You feel it, don’t you?
The world itself is rebelling,
nature turning on us,
and we pretend it’s all a fluke,
something we’ll fix later,
if there is a later.

Starvation, it’s a war of a different kind.
It doesn’t take a bullet to kill a man,
just a slow, agonizing emptiness
that eats away at him
until he’s nothing but bones.
Too many people, too little food,
too much waste.

We gorge ourselves on excess,
while others die waiting for a single meal.
It’s shameful, fellow poet's 
The kind of shame you can’t drink away,
can’t write away.

The sky, once so vast, so open,
now thick with smoke.
We’ve filled it with the ghosts of our machines,
polluted every breath we take,
and still, we look up
and pretend the stars will save us.
But the stars, they’re dying too,
burning out like candles in a storm.

Leaving Earth—
well, that’s the dream of cowards, isn’t it?
Running from the mess we’ve made,
thinking we can start fresh somewhere else.
Mars, the moon—
hell, let’s pretend they’re not just more places
we’ll ruin with our greed.
We’re like the old explorers,
chasing after a horizon that doesn’t exist,
believing the lies we tell ourselves.

And wealth—how much is too much?
I’ve seen men drown in gold,
and still, their thirst wasn’t quenched.
There’s no bottom to that well, fellow poet's.

You chase after it, thinking you’ll find
some sort of peace,
but all you find is emptiness,
more hollow than any battlefield.
Wealth doesn’t make you full—
it leaves you starving in a different way.

So these are my words,
simple and sharp, like the point of a bayonet.
Maybe they’ll mean something,
maybe they’ll be forgotten,
but I couldn’t leave without saying them.
The world, James, it’s burning.
And all we can do
is try not to burn with it.

Copyright © James Mclain | Year Posted 2024

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