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When You Use Your Child as a Weapon

from What the Wind Whispers to the Mountain Ear by Seth Walker Poetry

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lyrics

When you use your child as a weapon
their life becomes a bullet
Knowing only the black powder you packed behind it
It will crawl into the barrel unquestioningly

Its path, redirected toward your fellow gunsmith…
Your trigger finger will fiddle vengeful ideas
Chuckling with power, you will forget
That the scope cannot avert its own site
Learning only what it sees, it will remember everywhere it’s pointed

-

When your child becomes the weapon, you raised it to be
You’ll convince yourself, that not all weapons misfire
Not this one, not mine…
But there will, in every gun’s life, come an innocent bystander
Chalk, outlining something dying
Missing, Lost, stepped over
A childhood – forgotten


-

when your weapon starts acting-out like an adolescent
you will convince yourself that gun-making is a job
you’re doing your job
your gun, it may even tell you
you’re just doing a job

when you pause – realizing, for the first time…
you just called your child “it”, in conversation…
you will realize “it” was right…
you… my bloody-handed gunsmith… did a good and thorough job…

-

When the weapon you raised childishly learns of its own power
The barrel’s tip, finally finding its handler’s tender toe
You will feel the piercing sting of your own loaded words
Pointed back at you
smell the gun smoke waft from their shrapnel laced lips…
know that this is what you look like
those days you purposely avoid mirrors

-

when the “it” you raised finally accepts its weaponization
it will learn to point and shoot at other “it”s with less stammering
this is why “it”s make such good soldiers
being good soldiers is what made
gun-smiths out of our grandparents

our grandparents came back from wars,
broken weapons, misfiring on our makers

we were raised by their bystanders turned side-arms
then used in their wars against… everything
our parents grew us to be good little grenade crops
now, have the nerve to ask us; “Why all the explosions?”

-

When the little mirror you made
Is finally so broken, you can no longer see yourself in it
You will know it is your truest reflection…

it is those things we most deeply love, we will always hurt the most
this is what we broken humans were raised to do

-

to all the other barrel tips with hot lead on their lips
stop…
refashion your self
you are more than a hardening exterior wrapped round a death threat
you were a diamond hidden in detonator
your name is not “it” just because it was forgotten

let the crumbling towers fall…
help smash the fractured vessels
rebuild your new cases from the ground-down shatter-dust
stop forcing fragments into framework
for the mere appearance of wholeness

before the spasm-crack of birthing whiplashed your knowing away
you had velocity of your own…
life is inertia…
quit blaming yourself for existing…
stop cursing the light for shadows
a gun sunk deep enough in the earth might as well be a rock…
dig deep child…

-

When we raise our children to be weapons
We are tenderly tucking them, aimed upward, beneath our chin
Wrapping our tightening grip round our own futures
And getting what we worked so hard for…

credits

from What the Wind Whispers to the Mountain Ear, released April 25, 2013

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Seth Walker Poetry Boulder, Colorado

Seth Walker is Texas' most notorious traveling poet and top ranked slam poet in the world. Seth has performed at venues across the country including Da Poetry Lounge (CA), The Green Mill (IL), & The Nuyorican (NY). Along the way he won: the Utah State Arts Fair Poetry Slam (2009), North Beast Indie Slam North-Eastern Regional 2010), as well as as slamming, with the 2010 Austin Poetry Slam Team and ... more

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