We can walk you down our genealogies etched into our blood's cellular tides.

Ledgers, chants, documents.

Old, waxy, yellow.
Ancestors who starved under British flags;
Dyed the Amazon bloody for Portugal's banner.

Our inheritance, painted in carmine shades.

Men who tossed away their lives in both world wars.
Women who lived and died as wall decor.
Knights who lanced children.
Whores who saved babies.

We can show you how our great-great-greats

Stole and raped
Under wind-whipped fabric scraps—standing for nothing more than:

Conquest, barbarism, greed.

We can tell you of thirteen stripes and fifty stars
That staggered across a continent
Drunk on the power of a rifle.

We come from islands—Madeira.
Poor islands, where people saw structured systematic slavery
As a better alternative to life.
We signed ourselves off to plantations,

Legal chains,
And let the industrials carry us off to foreign shores

Where we could hold their whips: entitlement and subjugation.


Our veins match the crimson that

In 1921
Ran red the streets of Dublin,
Watered Union Jack's bayonets,
Soaked pastures and potato fields.

A handful left

For a land of milk and honey, an ocean away.


Our blood holds secrets,
Pride and shame—
Part ichor, part poison
Damn, we're afraid.
Afraid of me


Afraid of what another century
Will carve into the adenine/cytosine/thymine/guanine
Double helixes that become me forever.
Afraid of what my inheritance will be.

Afraid of being responsible for the bullets of tomorrow,
The shackles of today,
Unspilt tears laid waste on a path marred for generational eternity.

Blood doesn't lie.
My imprint on the future is written in
The veracity of molecular patterns.

Am I a coward?

Yes.
But, like the rest of the world,


I hide behind masks of political correctness


And the fallacy that pain fades temporally

Rather than accept my irrevocably flawed humanity.