History isn’t a teacher
it’s a butcher,
hanging the same bodies on the same hooks,
pressing play on the same red-stained reel.
Every century tastes like rusted deja vu:
Sudan’s rivers thick with clotted blood,
Palestine’s sky peeled open like a wound that refuses to scab,
Burkina Faso burying children in soil
so overworked by grief it no longer knows how to cradle life,
And Congo it watches,
watches the world gnawing at its minerals
like scavengers chewing through marrow
while pretending not to taste the mourning.

And we
we sit at this banquet of nations,
drinking the blood of their genocides for supper,
pretending the iron sting on our tongues
isn’t the metallic echo of complicity.
We raise cathedrals out of bones,
stack graves like architecture,
scrape names into marble
only to splash them with new blood again
a fresh coat of crimson for every cycle
the world refuses to unlearn.

They tell us never again.
They carve it into stone,
etch it onto the lips of schoolchildren,
offer it like communion
yet every altar we build
drips.

Never again, never again, never again
the words fracture,
a cracked mirror mantra,
each shard reflecting another century
that looks exactly like the last.
What good is a promise
when it has become a parody of itself,
a ritual recited with the same empty precision
as signing another weapons deal,
another veto,
another silence?

And I wonder
what good are words
if they break in my mouth
before they break the machinery
that keeps grinding bodies into headlines,
keeps turning nations into obituaries,
keeps publishing death as if it’s
an administrative update?

So hear me now
not as elegy
but indictment,
not as eulogy
but eruption:

Never again.

Never again.

Never.
Again.

And let the phrase be more than breath.
Let it be fracture.
Let it be blade.
Let it splinter the hands
that keep pressing repeat.
Let it finally make the ground
remember how to refuse the weight of new graves.

Let this never again
be the last never again
we’re forced to make