manunkind

i’ve never eaten shit
i’ve never been curb stomped
i’ve never had needles shoved under my fingernails
i’ve never been fucked in the ass with a knife

but someone has

i asked my grandfather’s grandfather why i was born
with the negative of a noseless man’s two nostrils
burnt into my retinas
and a ring of bite marks from a set of baby teeth
tattooed around my penis

he licked his lips and said:

humans have been humans for 200,000 years
and we get bored easily
our thumbs grew twisted
to better beat off and rip the wings from flies

there is no god organ in our reptile brains
there is no moral compass buried in our chests
just shrapnel from botched surgeries
there is no logic, only rhetoric
there is no science, only dogma

he put his hand on my thigh and told me:

in the future, they’ll attribute our cruelty
to chemical imbalances and bad parenting
and they’ll forgive us with brand new hearts
pumping blood full of nanorobots and arrogance
and they’ll laugh in steely voices
at our crude self-portraits
fading in the corners of rotting history books