Code We Carry in the Marrow

by: E.M. Burlingame

The air still hums with forces most ancient,
a wind that knows my father’s hands—
how they could take a life or cradle a child,
both true, both trembling.
I think of men, their bones tuned to a frequency
of raid and ruin,
to split the earth open and take what spills—
or to stand at the edge of eternity,
weapons ready, waiting for the bullet’s kiss.

And women—my mother’s shadow moves
through the kitchen, a ghost of flour and ash—
a woman’s body a map of what’s been claimed,
raided, torn, stolen, survived and thrived,
a hymn of surrender sung through clenched teeth.
Each spring, they fed sons to the blade,
daughters to the invader’s lust,
and called it nature, called it love.

Millions of years, a slow forge—
these quirks, these hungers,
etched into us, twisted survival instincts,
in the dark, a hand on a throat,
a body saying mine or I’ll win and use him.
Instincts that worked not so long ago,
when chaos and conflict were the only law,
when peace and please were words no one used.

What warped instincts, what flickering turn-ons,
what kinks did the violence and sacrifice knead into many?
A man dreaming of conquest, rape and taking, or their denial
a woman of being conquered, of the theft and death of her children—
millions of years outliving the grinding of life against life,
all teaching the masses to crave, endure, submission,
the sublime found in a thrust, in the cut of a knife,
beings yet seeking endless endings, till the end.

Now, we sit in rooms with steady light,
pretend the past doesn’t pulse under our skin.
The man who steals a wallet, a woman, a life,
the woman who dreams of a stranger’s weight—
Jung, the master, called it our shadow,
these perversions we bury but cannot drown.
These fetishes seep out anyway,
in the newsfeed’s flicker—
theft, rape, murder,
a man’s wrathful fist, a woman’s pleasured sigh,
and we nod, call it fate and failure,
as if the old gods once wrote us clean.

Civilization tries to stitch us shut,
thread confining laws through our ribs,
says no to the beast pacing the cage.
But the cage rattles—
a boy sharpens a stick in the yard,
a girl braids her hair and imagines it pulled.
We deny it,
say we’ve outgrown survival’s darker code,
and so the shadow of reality hums yet fiercer,
a chorus of what we dare not name.

To thrive, we must accept the shadow as truth,
twists and instincts so deeply wired,
all far more than a dark script, dark song.
Or else we’ll keep offering ourselves
as slaves, to the latest gods of sensation—
destruction, in a ravager’s grip, failure of the law,
rape and murder in our streets and homes,
recreating conditions, memories, our bones know.

Here I sit with a lighted candle,
watching the flame burn toward nothing.
It’s not peace I want, no,
just a way to confine this archaic beast
that would take and break and secure the world.