Accepting what I cannot

Generational trauma

Shalom Mishpachah, can you smell the bodies

I had a dream where papa shot me

Sometimes he loses his temper tells me I am why he left

The messiah hasn't even come to save us so how could he be dead?

I have seen demons take people's sisters as young as ten years old

Best friends' parents holding a false God's hand that goes by the name of "methadone"

These devils killed a loved one in their sleep

So, I keep a bottle in my mouth to muffle the screams

Gruesome stories of much older days

About a great grandfather putting lead in his wife's face

And that is why they changed my grandmother's birthday and name

Threw away her records so she would never know from which the place she came

Misfortune does not seem to stop

Finding out her adopted father got stabbed going for a jog

There are ghosts of several having feuds in my head

But all agreeing I am not worth more than the dead

There is a side of holocaust survivors

They make my dad an angry driver

Trying to kill himself and his kids in the car

Even in days where we are not fleeing from being forced to wear a star

I must be wrong for thinking my ancestors are raging

I hope that I am wrong and that they do not wish to change me

Stuck in this tug o' war between believing and queer

Maybe grandmother Miriam would have accepted me if she were still here

I fear dying from a man with a gun

Of history repeating itself and dying too young

I see swastikas fly in modern day

Guarding Hitlers wannabe heirs from my last name

Pissed off men swing rifles in the air

While I relive generations of women being dragged by their hair

They relay the message of "stay in your place or get shot"

But I grow stronger with every label and with every blood clot

My ancestors are in a racial dispute

And that is my life of being born half Jew

And the shame I feel is because I cannot say that is the only reason

That I do not know the answers or what it is that I need to believe in

There is a side that passed down to me a bloodied hand

And another a fist with a good reason to be mad