Bloodline (2025)

I drank myself to death
for the first time today.
Not a tragedy,
just a ceremony,
my body bowing
to the ghost that raised it.

My brain was a courtroom,
my memories the jury,
and they whispered: it’s time to pay
for every resentment
that you have buried.

Somewhere between
the burn and the blur,
I met a version of myself
that felt rehearsed…
like this sorrow was scripted
long before my birth.

Could it be in my DNA?
or in the name
Mother Earth gave my sun
one brutally cold winter day.

I used to search for answers,
now I study the silence—
how it moves,
how it hides.

And I think of my father,
his hands shaking like mine,
his quiet distress—
how we both worship at the altar
of something that never loved us back.

M.H. John