WAR

Before humoring it in distasteful chatter

Let me remind you first that war is no joking matter

War is thinking of home with such piercing pain that the nothingness of a stranger’s place found in the strangest of places appeals to the numbing emptiness that provides the only room for rest

It is the stories of seen but unspoken evil refugees and the stranded many carry heavy on their chests praying to whatever they can bring themselves to believe in that it should never again manifest

War is what breaks a man’s soul when he does the most questionable just to exorcise what little control he has over a situation that draws his family to its knees

It’s a woman whose dignity is stolen from her even in the discomfort of her abode so her entire family sees

How does she heal herself in time to teach her little girl who suffered the same episode before she begins to see herself as nothing more than just a wet hole?

War takes the penis of a barely teenage boy out of his hands and puts a gun in its stead so in his head a finger on a trigger is how to masturbate

War is these ugly truths told to you straight without much room to exaggerate.

It is no specific target of gun shots and indiscreet slaughtering in the streets.

In Sierra Leone, they ignored pleas and grieves before they cleaved arms like branches off trees and blood dripped down helplessly like leaves

The dismemberment of another flesh and blood was reduced to the levity of long or short sleeves

Rwanda saw 800,000 killed within a span of one hundred days, that’s eight thousand humans a day, three hundred and thirty-three an hour

Six lives devoured a minute worsens the taste of what’s already sour all in the name of so-called power

The falling rain itself came to be a reminder to the people of Liberia that they were under attack

In 1990 the heaven’s cries met gun powder in the skies so when it poured down, the water was black

There are media footages from DR Congo, Somalia, Burkina Faso, all publicly accessible but remember not all the details were archived

Many of us will go deprived of the sordid reality lived by many of those who survived.

All die be die be lie to the living

When you’re given the displeasure of seeing the spirit of your loved one escape him and the emotion your feel first is hatred before you even get the chance to mourn

And know now that war knows no age so even babies fall victim before they’re born

War is missing brothers, fathers, sisters, mothers and lovers better off assumed dead because your soul is just too weary for hope to beget

War is me at twenty-five, seventeen years after my family got out alive convincing myself the object that flew unrecognized by my eye wasn’t a bullet

The one I believe I had seen, eight years old locked in my neighbor’s tight room with steel doors because that was our definition of a safe haven

Rebels a few years older than me trapping two dozen of us due to our fear of what they could do with an AK47

That kind of fear grows with a child’s imagination so there’s no more telling what’s real and unreal regardless of what truth is revealed

My truth is what eyesore my mind told me my eyes saw

War is me still too scared or angry at the nightmare to ask what we were fighting for.

Wars are the singular cause of the mental deconstruction of a people with no therapy to their tragedy

They are a sadist’s feast of rape, murder, cannibalism, abuse and everything tragic

The human comparison to the ugliness of the foretold black magic

War brings out the evil side of evil and is its own justification of immorality

War is the unnatural decomposition of humanity

The sensitivity of this issue is paralyzing without a doubt

So please don’t make light of this because war my dear people, is nothing to joke about.