Nothing is fair in love and war

​It could have been you, me, or anyone with a name if not for the place.
​When dreams wear the mask of nightmares with roars of helplessness, disdain, and bone-chilling shock.
Where nerves begin to tighten around your throat, the end is near.
​Silence. Pleading. Gunshot. Silence.

​Daybreak cracks from our jaws to pour sunlight onto Mother Earth's lap where her sons bleed over her own bounty.
The soil is different now.
It mourns the souls created to be destroyed.
She has failed. We have failed her.
​While the Blue Mormon butterfly sits with such dignity on the scarlet velvet petals of the newly bloomed tulip, bullets are pierced through my people for not chanting the same name of God.
Take my life too. No. Live through this trauma for merely existing.
Because the freckles on your tongue need to be put to shame.
​Silence. Live. Silence. Shoot.

​How will a son climb into bed knowing his father's ashes echo through blood-drenched valleys and unreachable mountaintops but will never be by his side to sing him to sleep?
His life drained in front of naive little eyes.
The fearless widow wears white, threads of which are woven in travesty.
Stitches undone with scabs of martyrdom, wounds of which run deeper than entailed history.
​The footfalls of the night are eerie with mutilated shadows,
light unable to bend through the dense mindset of people.
The air that once wafted with gales of the nightingale,
shattered with the ghoulish smell of lives gone too soon for nothing but their innocence.
​Innocence. Laughter. Chaos. Innocence. Kill.

​They kill the innocent because they never had that. Never will. Never want to.
Kill in God's name, but which God gives you this power, for he himself feels powerless.
​It's easier to hate than love, to rebel than coexist,
To wash the blood on your hands than the sins of your past.
Water begins to lose its color, and so does life.