I know what it means to go the mirror & not find anyone in there, to
scream until the walls shape-shift into maps / & the roof submits to gravity, & yet
your lips were never unsealed.
You see, several months ago I had looked at me & said; dreams do come true, that for
today we’ll scale through. But the boy facing me didn’t repeat after me. He was mute. So I carried
silence back into myself like a river pulling stray waters into itself // & laid slowly
down between fate & despair.
I’ve had my fair share of life’s debris. A thousand times reality has borne my body to
the grave where I buried yesterday, & I found myself an exhumer; confounded, but
digging out the ruins of the past. Oh wasn’t this the height of a breathing oblivion?
Where I live, I’ve seen enough headlines to doubt the existence of flowers, to take
a rose to the lab & prove that it’s blood. Tomorrow’s blood. Hope is not something that
sells well here. The papers show us that tyranny’s bullets racing to severe the tongue(s)
of freedom sells better. Believe me, the voices that exited their bodies on the night of
October, Twenty Thousand and Twenty (2020) didn’t plan to be buyers. No one plans to be.
Not me. But over here democracy has been christened to mean everything save the preservation of
a dear nation.
The TV, every 8am, will take you by the hand & lead you to the slaughterhouse where
tomorrow have been dismembered again & again. Every four years, every four years,
it appears our tears are renewed. Given freshness. The height of life’s wreckage.
But you see, I’m still here.
Inasmuch as reality has often succeeded in
showing me the magnanimity of the other end of the dagger to
eradicate the burden of planting in the soil & reaping a
windstorm, I am still here, & you’re still reading this,
& hope doesn’t exist amongst the dead. This much a billion wreckage cannot disprove.
So, for tonight, I have decided to draw the curtain & allow the moon an entrance.
To unwrap myself from this blanket of melancholy & give the gentle
breeze of hope a chance.
I’ve decided to untie the parts of me wounded by murdered dreams &
broken promises, & flush down the drain. To break the wall beating behind
my left breast pocket & make an opening for light // & allow this poem live in me.
Oh let this poem be in me, & in you. & in you.