Tuesday, 9 September 2025

Coins Of Blood

War is not a fresh idea.

It is older than the oldest fermentation

you’ve raised to your lips in the name of vintage whiskey.

It is as constant as physics claims energy to be, 

never ceasing, only shifting form.


War is older than the whole of humanity,

and yet every time it slithers back

we pretend it is the first,

because pro-bono empathy costs less

than sponsored violence,

and humans still need to prove

they are better than anything else that breathes.


But violence is the only thing truly democratic.

It does not distinguish

between mother, father, or child.

It arrives like a hungry tide,

sweeping entire families whole.

Bullets cannot tell the rich from the poor. 

Grenades do not ask for caste, creed or gender.

When death becomes religion, blood becomes worship,

and every breathing skin is lamb for the altar.

And if gods have taught us anything,

it is that they can never have enough.


What was once Auschwitz

became Syria,

became Afghanistan,

became Palestine.

What was once the ash of cities,

the rubble of villages,

the exile of countless souls,

has only changed names over time.

And still, the earth spins indifferently,

a billion lives circling the sun

as if corpses were not orbiting too.


War has become slogan and headline,

debate and performance,

and worst of all:

metaphor for the linguistic elites.

The hunter and the hunted

reduced to language,

because words are all the world ever spares,

while corpses pay debts in flesh.


The soil of old graves

is tilled to grow new ones.

Every silence between wars

is not peace,

only the inhale before

another detonation.

Even music learns this rhythm:

pause, then requiem.


We carve halos and horns

on whichever corpses suit the story,

but stone tablets crumble faster

than fresh gunpowder.

The air itself

negotiates the borders daily,

as easily as a finger through dust.


And when the coin is flipped,

both faces drip the same red.

Only the lettering changes.

And coins, after all,

were meant to be spent

until nothing remains

but their weight in bone.

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