We are always scared that we might turn up dead tomorrow, and when we don’t, another woman dies instead. We wake up to the weight of the news like it is our own story because it is, because we are her, and she too was like us before she was taken. She too lived in a space of unknown seconds to come, she too was like us when she read of women who were stabbed, raped and brutally murdered by lovers, strangers, service consultants, friends, colleagues and relatives. We cry.
But nowadays we turn numb while the news sit on our tongues like they belong there; we are starting to believe that they do, there are places that open up and swallow the news every week, every day, a place that spits out fury and grief. We sit with it; we die a little every time so that when our turn comes, we only have the pain of being brutally hacked. While similar stories drown in a noise of ego boiling from the mouths of men who sing “not me, not all men and men too” every second, while a woman dies at the turn of an hour.
These are not statistics
Men have taken
Men have taken
Men have taken
Men have Been taking!!
Now we sit and we wait
For the world to go poor of women
While men remain, among each other
Chanting ‘not all men’
Men too suffer
Men too
In a quagmire of their own selves
Remaining to an empty world
A future that will end when the last man has died
Alas we will return to a world of sane men
Of loving fathers who stay
Of responsible uncles who do not put six year old girls on their laps no end
Of fathers who don't sell of their teenage daughters to Grey headed neighbours for cows
To boys found digging in the pants of infants
We will begin again
Afresh
But then we will call the shots
Because men have failed at love
