Civilization is Varnish We stood upright to carry our dead brothers First steps on savannah left blood in the dust Twenty branches cut from the family tree Only us remain, the first genociders Homo habilis didn't talk, he just smashed Erectus burned the forest to hunt And when he met Neanderthal in the snow He didn't offer flowers, he cracked the skull Selective extinction, evolution by murder We are children of the original slaughter We learned to speak to lie to the other side Domesticated fire to burn their villages First words were us against them Since then exile means war Gods born from fear, fear fed with meat Firstborn sacrificed, virgins to volcanoes Culture didn't save us from the beast Just software updating our bloody hardware Civilization: varnish on prehistoric bone Laws written by the hand that holds the sword Progress: the excuse we give for the neighbor's corpse Born in January forty-four While the world bled out at Bastogne and Stalingrad Europe a smoking graveyard, my cradle: rubble My first lullaby: bomber engines We planted wheat and walls grew up Borders drawn with compass on foreign flesh Rulers with algorithm hearts Calculate dead like stock dividends Why if we share ninety-nine point nine of the code Do we invent the zero point one of hate to kill? Tribe nation race: mapped lies To justify the kid over there dies while the kid here cries We perfected killing like we perfected the clock Now we kill remote, don't look them in the eye Drones playing video games with real people Missiles celebrating freedom with fireworks War after war, generation after generation Millions born, dream, love, become statistics Can't stop it, hurts to feel my equals' pain Shared genetics brothers broken by shrapnel MUST IT BE THIS WAY? HOW TO REPAIR SUCH TORMENT? How to look an orphan in the eye and promise evolution? I DON'T ACCEPT calling this slaughter PROGRESS It's not progress, it's stagnation in blood Only animal that builds hospitals then bombs them We industrialize compassion while industrializing death We climbed to the stars with rifles on our shoulders Earth is blue, fragile, no borders from up there Moon Mars projects of life in the void But down here we still count bodies per acre Do we need to see ourselves from far away to know we're one? No, we know it. We just choose to forget Choose to stay homicidal beasts with god technology Aggression genes, impossible to edit Programmed for lethal competition in an era that doesn't need it Born under bombs, will die under bombs Between both points we call history this refined torture From humanoids to astronauts Same blood, same fear, same horror But this pain I feel, this rejection of violence This nausea at another's suffering Is it the first mutation of new evolution? Or just the luxury of seeing the primate will never stop being primate And the only real progress was our weapons While the soul still drags through the prehistoric savannah? We are the only species that knows it will die And the only one that speeds the death of others From fear of our own end
