Do you know what it feels like to have a machete taken to your lungs to hold the drill in your hand for so long you forget it's not a part of your body to work in a place where light at the end of the tunnel is more than just a figure of speech. Welcome to the marks where men work so far underground that sunlight is manufactured from headlamps and golden foot where the sound of breaking bodies is drowned beneath a cacophony of hollow coughs and hammers with disease. Festers in the air as if the earth rolling a grudge against mankind prevailing to keep her secrets. In the South African gold mine the reality of tuberculosis can make every breath feel like a death sentence. The toxic dust from a million year old rocks like a swarm of dancing landmines along the walls of the ribcage, the environment of bacteria crawling through your throat tsunamis, oscillacosis and sweat crashing ensures a black backstrike with the line whipped so these men with cobblestone skin, jackhammer, huts and jar bones clenched like redemption exposed themselves to a world of disease and degradation unlike anywhere else on earth. How are running? That the industry was possible for the success of South Africa's economy is also culpable for a pandemic wiping out thousands of her people. These are the consequences of corporate indifference where executives unwilling the part ways with the pocket change percentage of their profits, they able illness to run rampant in a community they are supposed to protect. With golden clocks hanging in their offices like stolen hayloes they refuse to provide real care for the very people who created their wealth. So why would anyone subject themselves to this? But what choice does a man have when he has to feed his family? When jobs are scarce as roses on a crumbling battlefield when he knows his wife and children can't survive off of unfulfilled promises. So he puts on his heart, turns on his light and marches miles beneath the earth amongst blocks of ground faces with no choice but to pummel his heart against the walls of this mine as if he were searching for his dignity. And when the miners are deemed too sick to work, they are simply sent home like disposable human tools that have lost the sharpness of their edges with HIV and tuberculosis cascading in his power bound to go wet through their bloodstream fathers. Falling in the eyes of their children praying they don't succumb to the same fate lying on death fes made of debris and lost hope screaming at the top of their lacerated lungs and guia gula guia tail guia fa I am sick I am tired I am dying Imagine your father choking on the inevitabilities of his past your mother widowed by the misfortune of other people's apathy your brothers and sisters settling for a future that seems all but in escape how much longer can we watch as generations of black men are cycled through a system that treats them like dirt how much longer can we simply watch them sent home to die