My grandfather died of it, my father is already showing signs,
I’ve been watching the calendar, I’ve been reading the designs,
Of inheritance written into protein and cell wall,
The family history that hangs above us like a pall.
The doctor drew a tree of us and noted which branch fell,
And where the fault line in the DNA decided to rebel,
I am the youngest branch, I haven’t reached the age yet where,
The thing that took the others tends to surface in the air.
Bloodline curse, running through the generations straight,
Bloodline curse, it doesn’t ask us whether we want to wait,
My grandfather, my father, and the shadow over me,
The bloodline curse is older than the oldest family tree,
Bloodline curse, I carry it before I know I’m sick,
Bloodline curse, the inheritance I couldn’t pick.
I get the screenings every year, I take the pills they say,
I do the things that might delay the debt I’ll have to pay,
But in the back of every ordinary healthy day,
I feel the thing my father feels beginning to relay.
What does it mean to love a body that will turn on you,
By schedule and by program, by the code that runs it through,
To know the mechanism that will someday be your end,
To live inside the house of it without being able to mend.
I watch my father’s hands now for the tremor and the shake,
I watch the way he navigates the things the body makes,
More difficult each year, and I am taking mental notes,
Of what it looks like from the outside when the current slows.
I don’t want sympathy, I want a different future for my son,
I want the science moving faster than the chain begun,
I want somebody cracking what we carry in the code,
Before the bloodline curse unpacks and settles into load.