Blood & Bome, Glass & Stone

Helping each other isn’t kindness.

It’s a transaction in camouflage;

a barter written in invisible ink.

Your need aligned with mine.

Your fire cooking my food.

My shelter covering your sleep.

That is not kindness.

That is common convenience.

And convenience

is far nobler than kindness.

Because kindness wears debt like perfume;

smells sweet when sprayed,

but always stings the lungs.

Every “favour” is owed back.

Every “gesture” becomes a receipt.

Humans demand interest on their halos,

gratitude as tax

for moments they fondly call generosity.

No kindness is ever felt.

It is either

cold arithmetic in the skull,

or warm self-worship

on the altar of the moral high ground.

That is why cavemen

were more evolved than us.

Not in language.

Not in monuments that scrape skies.

But in the naked honesty of survival.

They didn’t pretend.

They didn’t stretch out hands to say, 

"I saved you, brother

now carve my name in stone."

They helped because wolves hunted in packs.

Because without you, the mammoth would have trampled me.

Because survival is not a sermon.

It is blood-and-bone mathematics.

And yes, they could trap, bait,

outwit the land itself.

We? We cannot last a season

without inventions we no longer understand.

Let fire vanish.

Let steel corrode.

Let the sun withdraw its warmth.

Seventy percent of us collapse

like clay without water.

The caveman had no ego.

He had hunger.

He had cold.

He had death at his throat

each time the wind howled.

We? We have nothing but ego.

We fight not to survive, 

but to prove superiority.

Over neighbors.

Over nations.

Over gods.

Over tongues.

As if survival itself were

too cheap a victory.

But if the cavemen appeared today, 

raw from stone,

stripped of mercy,

dropped into this world of softened spines, 

who do you think would wake up 

to the next sunrise? 

You will say, 

the era is ours

as are the terrains

the time is ours

as are the weapons. 

They don't stand a chance. 

But, hear me out. 

Give them one month.

One month to smell the rot of comfort.

To watch our hands tremble

at the thought of splitting wood.

And before you blink for your next breath, 

they would decimate us.

Hunt us in the ruins of our monuments.

Skin us beneath our painted flags.

Because walls don’t keep out cold

when fire has fled.

Because stone outlives glass.

Eat. Sleep. Procreate. Repeat.

Those were the basics of existence.

The building blocks.

The marrow’s one command.

Everything else

purpose, career, enlightenment, God

is a fable we sold ourselves

to escape the silence of the night.

Yes, we wrote poems about sex.

Called it intimacy, art, love.

We dressed it in words

until even lust wore a crown.

But sex was never sacred.

It was never about roses or rings.

It was biology’s unbroken law.

We are the only species cursed

to be in heat all year.

Dogs and birds and fishes wait.

As do lions and monkeys.

Seasons dictate their ache.

But humans?

We’re hungry even at funerals.

So we invented purposes.

To fence inheritance,

to lock down property,

to turn desire into dynasty.

Once armory was forged,

once fire obeyed,

we were left with nothing left to fear.

So we traded body heat like rodents,

and fought like hyenas over dead meat.

Because without death chasing us,

we needed smaller deaths, 

for us to have stories and be the heroes in them. 

So, like vicious liars 

high on auctioned wisdom and borrowed whiskey, 

we invented a wish list of little deaths.

Wars, marriages, religions, kindness.

Truth be told, 

convenience is the only truth.

And if you doubt it, 

strip naked.

Step into the wild on a full moon night.

When your teeth chatter

and your stomach gnaws your spine,

you will not pray for kindness.

You will claw for convenience.