Generational Infection

My father’s patterns lived in me before I learned to see them,
the way the body absorbs the posture of the system
that formed it in the early years before the self is hardened
into something you can call your own and still be pardoned.

He didn’t mean to pass it, and he probably doesn’t know
that what he carried from his own father’s long ago
is something I still navigate in rooms he’s never entered,
and address in language that he doesn’t have.

The trauma research says it alters the epigenetic
expression of the code, the cellular kinesthetic
response to threat is calibrated by the history
of what the ancestors survived.

Which means the body I was born in was already tuned
to the threat-frequency that had bloomed
through my grandfather’s catastrophe
and wired the response into what was given to me.

I’m trying to be the generation where the chain adjusts,
where I work on what I carry so the transfer doesn’t thrust
the same calibration into the next link of the line.

I’m not optimistic that I’m doing it completely right,
but the attempt itself is something different than the flight
from acknowledging what’s there.
The infection visible at last
is harder to pass forward than the unnamed from the past.

Generational infection, the sickness moves through time.
Generational infection, passing down the line.
Each generation carries what it got and didn’t choose.
Generational infection and the remediation’s news.