The Flesh Of My Father Poem by Tanathica

In part we are made from the flesh of our fathers
And part from our mothers, but we are not either
When we live, struggle, sleep and we die - it's a theatre
We are named, and we keep them, despite what we'd rather

Since scraping our bellies away from the water
That somewhere the first of our fathers was spawned
We've shifted in parts, survival and slaughter
The agent forthcoming the son and daughter

The petal is stained by the water it drinks
The child by the hand on the cradle that rocks
And the brain of the man by the thought that he thinks
And his thoughts of the world with herd that he flocks

A family is a canny sort of structure
So wracked by dearth, mistrust and civil war
A microcosmic city-state of nature
With tyrants, drudges, rebels and the law

One night, rage controlled me, I sent my entreaty
In signatures backwards, in sulfur and blood
Virum lacerabo, me laceravi
And let thoughts of vengeance wash in like a flood

And sure as the nightfall a being comes to me
I care not his aims or his name - this he knows
'Your vice is a crucible forging your pity
But now with the moon it waxes and grows'

It's tough to say when I transformed first
My hands will be stained - but stains can be washed
I might swallow blood - but it won't turn to thirst
At least no more than the one I quashed

The conflict I guess, in some ways is clever
To make life poor, nasty, brutish and long
When was it I altered, or was it not ever?
Complied with the leisure, alive, all along?

The flesh of my father, it tastes all the sweeter
Knowing between us one monster is dead
And now that it's over, I swear I shall prosper
And cast all this ancestry out of my head

Funny old sayings insist on intruding
‘Like father like son' - ‘you are what you eat'
I recall though, we change for the sake of surviving
We think and we thrive or sit still in defeat

I have a suspicion Sonneillon is plotting
To feed from my actions, or Vetis at least
I end the night laughing, scraping the rotting
Flesh of my father from gaps in my teeth


(My terrible formal latin is intending to say something like 'I will tear the man to peices, I have torn the man to peices)