"We Are Human"

"We Are Human"

Men colonize our bodies.  They split them into territories, they create highways and housing for their businesses and beliefs.  They erect monuments that celebrate their fleshy swords like false idols to their savior.  

They beat our bodies to drill our life source to fuel their systems of oppression and call it manifest destiny - a divine law.  They convince us that we are diseased, misbegotten men as they rape us into silence.  They command us to cover ourselves out of respect, but is it respect when they feed our bodies to the highest punter?

They traffic us to foreign countries with false hope of a better future.  They turn our bodies into unknown regions that we, women, must learn to assimilate.  We are assigned statuses like street names and billboard signs.  We become

Wives, 
Property, 
Whores,
Lovers, 
Temptations, 
Nymphs, 
Lolitas, 
But never their equals.

They dissect us into tits and ass and holes to fuck - we become tagged walls - "for a good time call...."

And we pump ourselves with drugs, drown ourselves in alcohol, pull out our hair, binge and purge, and cut into our flesh just to forget that our bodies are not our own.  Then, centuries after our internalized misogyny has set in, our borders are sealed and the anthems written that we, women dissect ourselves with the same pejorative language as we view our bodies through the gaze of men reflected back to us in our mirrors.  

We, women, birth their sons and daughters, and raise generation after generation just to watch history repeat itself rather than be made anew.  And I, wonder, do you want to see bruises on our flesh, like pulpy figs in smoldering heat, just to prove our lives are worth your consideration?  That our bodies, riddled in swollen welts, deserve the very basic of human rights?  That we deserve to feel safe in our own skin - to not feel like immigrants in these bodies you have now claimed as your 

States, 
Your churches, 
Your homes, 
And pulpits from which you speak of your moral truth,

Because the truth is we hare human, not districts to dominate.  We are human, not fields to plow.  We are human, not empires to build or provinces to own.  We are human, not neighborhood to gentrify.  We are human, not separate but equal.  We are human, and we deserve to be free of this toxic patriarchy. 
We.Are.Human.