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I bet you wouldn’t have guessed that

this is not an ordinary poem about the

Unceasing Darkness of our Turbulent Existence,

about the numbness of the State and the piercing shots

of bullets to young flesh, and the blood-curdling scream of

a motherless child.

No, this is not that.

For I cannot do justice to these emotions

of which I know nothing of.

I know nothing of their anger and fear, and hence

I cannot mourn for my generation like so many

articles tell me to, with their pictures of dirty blood

and political injustice.

What this poem is about is this – the gnawing, agonising conscience that grows

every second of every day until I sit still at night, briefly,

to think about what I have not done to deserve the good stuff

and what I won’t be doing to deserve everything else that will follow.

They do not prepare you for this, not in school and not in books,

and certainly not in the aesthetically crafted advertisements carefully measuring

every emotion they wish to evoke.

No, that won’t work for me.

They will have to create a brand new system of capitalising on human grief to

make me believe in the power of my own prayers.

Share this, to save a life.