Marigolds On My Iron Windows

Every year,

we iron the flag,

dust the portraits

of those who came before us,

and rehearse gratitude

for the air we inherited.

The nation wakes up

to celebrate

the day it stopped belonging

to someone else.

Funny.

How a house can celebrate

changing landlords

without ever asking

why its windows

were designed like bars.

The empire left.

The emperor stayed.

It changed clothes,

learnt our languages,

memorised our prayers,

and discovered

the easiest way

to rule a people

is to hand them keys

to a door

that was never theirs.

We broke the chains.

Then melted them down

into jewellery.

Wore them around our necks.

Passed them down

like heirlooms.

Called them tradition.

Called them culture.

Called them

the way things have always been.

Freedom is a strange thing.

Everyone carries

a photograph of it.

Few recognise

the face looking back.

The soil remembers

what borders forget.

The child inherits

a surname

before inheriting a sky.

The woman inherits

a body

the world keeps trying

to own.

The hungry inherit

the right to choose their master

before they inherit

the right to choose a meal.

Perhaps independence

was never merely

the absence of a foreign hand.

Perhaps the cruelest lesson

was discovering:

a hand does not need

to come from elsewhere

to become a fist.

And perhaps the deepest cage

is the one

we decorate every year,

hang flowers on,

invite guests into,

and proudly call

home.

Table Manners

Morality is a lukewarm finger bowl

we rinse our stained spines in,

so we can point at the hands

carrying the crumbs

from the world we made them eat.

Before Your Gods, I Was

I was born without a face.

That was your first mistake.

You thought monsters needed one.

The first part of me that grew was not a heart.

It was a finger. Pointing. Away.

I was born the first time 

a human being looked at the ruins

and searched for a stranger.

Before me, there was guilt.

After me, there was someone else.

I have existed longer than kingdoms.

Longer than borders.

Longer than gods.

I have worn every face you needed.

A demon when you wanted purity.

A monster when you demanded innocence.

A disease when you needed to feel healthy.

You gave me horns from your fear.

Teeth from your cruelty.

A name, because understanding was harder.

I have eaten gods.

Not because I hate them.

Because every god is a human fear wearing miracles.

I have eaten devils.

Angels.

Every excuse given a body.

They all taste the same when they are starving.

I have eaten monsters.

They were my easiest meal.

You carve them first.

Then wonder why they bite.

I have eaten evil.

You keep changing its name.

I keep tasting the same hunger.

I have tasted stars.

You blamed them too.

Every time the universe reminded you how small you were.

I do not live in darkness.

Darkness is where you bury your own.

I live in: "It was not me."

Look closely.

The fingerprints on my body are not mine.

They belong to you.

You have killed me a thousand times.

Burned me. Buried me.

Built monuments above me.

And every time you celebrate my death,

I return.

Not because I am immortal.

Because you need me.

Without me,

there is only the mirror;

no monster on the outside 

to hide what feeds inside.

No devil. No enemy.

No one left to blame.

So keep searching.

Keep pointing.

Keep asking: "Where does the monster live?"

Look at your hand.

The finger.

The mirror.

You've seen me before. 

I was never hiding.

You were looking away.

I am the oldest human prayer:

"Let it be someone else."

The Portrait Of My Extinction

I have never wished me inside of her.

No. This was never about arrival.

Carnal could never carry the weight of what I want to do with her.

As she walks in 

with her robe obliquely guarding 

an abundance

refusing containment, 

the charcoal trail

descending from her navel 

into the tides she hides within,

like scripture before language learned ink

I watch her peel it all off 

like the skin of tangerine, 

as I work up my palette of acrylics. 

I traverse her outlines,

my fingers becoming the brush,

trembling on the narrow bridge

between breath and hunger,

absorbing her and grazing her landscape, 

as if

I was trying to taste

what I was forbidden to consume.

I start from the nape 

with a dash of crimson,

and touch of ochre;

build a temple in her,

only to discover

I had entered one. 

The scent of sweat,

estrogen, progesterone,

soap, shampoo, 

and worn out perfume,

folding into acrylic —

this is what the divine smells like.

And as the colours bleed into her sweat, 

slowly dripping off of her, 

streams through her valleys, 

I kneel, 

my head bowing down

to the earth beneath her,

breathing in the petrichor

that haunts the air in her grasslands,

I watch me crumple into ashen white.

Fuck Fracture

Have you ever

desired and detested

in the very same moment,

the culmination of lust?

Have you ever

in the middle of fucking

hoped

fucks could be unfucked?

No,

not fornicate,

not make love,

not whatever poets and polite people call it,

just fuck,

blunt rusted knife

fuck.

Has your lust

ever looked back at you

and said,

I don't know you.

The Shape Of Wilderness

She cut her hair short.

Not because she had nothing to hide.

Because she had nothing that needed hiding.

She had already become a wilderness.

The slope behind her head

was a quiet rebellion against symmetry.

A reminder that mountains

were never designed to apologise for their peaks.

A strand fell diagonally across her eyebrows, across her eyes,

like even her own face needed a curtain to survive the violence of being looked at.

The universe tried to cover her. Failed.

The septum ring was not jewellery.

It was a warning.

A small piece of metal declaring:

"I have already made peace with pain.

Do not arrive with your knives and call them wounds."

Her lips were arrows.

Not the kind

that ask permission before finding their target.

The kind that make kingdoms surrender

and leave generations wondering

why they built walls

around something they could never contain.

Her curves were not decoration.

They were geography.

A landscape men had spent centuries trying to map,

forgetting that some terrains exist 

only to remind explorers how little they understand the earth.

And beneath all the poetry,

beneath every metaphor a desperate mind invents to possess what it admires,

was wilderness.

Untamed.

Unclaimed.

A place where nature itself had refused to build roads.

Because not everything beautiful was created

to be reached.

The metal shards piercing

through her burnt sienna blossoms

were not ornaments.

They were a flag planted in a territory

that had already declared independence.

The wild ferns she kept hidden

between her thighs

were not a florist's exhibition.

They were proof that even nature

refuses to grow according to someone else's map.

They were a forest refusing to become a bouquet.

They were a declaration carved in flesh:

"This body is not a museum for other people's opinions.

It is a country.

And I am the only government it recognises."

She had looked at the body the world handed her,

with all its evidence of survival,

and instead of asking for permission, she owned it.

She did not decorate herself. 

She authored herself.

That was the most dangerous thing about her.

Not the eyes. Not the lips.

Not the silhouette that made rooms forget what they were discussing.

It was the knowledge.

She knew.

She knew forests attract fires.

She knew oceans attract drowning.

She knew anything powerful enough to be desired

would eventually be mistaken for something conquerable.

She was not a muse.

Muses exist to be remembered.

She was something older.

Something before language discovered admiration.

A forest does not care who writes poems about trees.

It does not bloom to be called beautiful.

It simply grows.

And that was the terror of her.

She was never waiting to be seen.

She was the wilderness

that existed long before anyone arrived

with a language small enough to misunderstand it.

Cemeteries Do Not Grow Forests

Hair does not grow on scars.

An unremarkable biological fact.

Until you realise

even the body knows better

than to cultivate forests over cemeteries.

People say 

scars are proof that wounds heal.

No.

Scars are proof that wounds

are exceptionally good at leaving descendants.

They stop bleeding.

And still, they leave behind 

a document written into flesh.

The body 

has never resurrected a single thing

in its entire evolutionary career.

It does not restore.

It replaces.

It negotiates.

It bargains

with whatever remains.

Scar tissue is not healing.

It is the compensation

paid for something that cannot be returned.

My first scar wasn't earned.

It was issued.

My umbilical cord wasn't cut.

It was evicted.

The first home I ever knew

was the first place I was removed from.

Birth certificates are merely

official records of the original exile.

As for scars, 

hair does not return there, 

sweat does not return there, 

the original architecture does not return.

How strangely respectful the body is.

It refuses to build apartments

over demolished homes.

It knows better than humans do.

Some ruins are not meant to be renovated.

They are meant to remain as evidence.

Touch a scar. It feels different.

Because it is.

You are not touching repaired skin.

You are touching the closest thing

the living possess to a fossil.

A place where extinction arrived,

did its work, and left behind a witness.

A grave that learned how to breathe.

Every nation has scars.

It calls them borders.

Every religion has scars.

It calls them scripture.

Every family has scars.

It calls them tradition.

Humanity has always possessed a remarkable talent:

turning injuries into identities.

History is what happens

when a scar learns how to reproduce.

Wars give birth to flags.

Massacres give birth to anthems.

Graves give birth to holidays.

The dead have always been

our most successful architects.

We build civilizations

over their absence

and call the construction progress.

The body, however, is less dishonest.

It never claims the original skin returned.

It never confuses a replacement with a resurrection.

It simply leaves the mark and continues.

Not healed. Not restored.

Just carrying the remains of what it could not save.

Perhaps that is why

hair never grows on scars.

Even biology understands

what humans spend centuries trying to escape.

Some places are not wounds anymore.

They are graveyards.

Some memories are not memories anymore.

They are heritage.

Some histories are not histories anymore.

They are weapons that learned

to call themselves culture.

Because a scar

is not the body saying: "I survived."

That is the story humans tell themselves

because it sounds better.

A scar is the body saying: 

"Something happened here that was stronger than my ability to become what I was before."

And perhaps that is why we hate scars.

Not because they are ugly.

Because they are honest.

They do not forgive. They do not forget.

They do not rewrite the crime after the criminal has become a historian.

They simply remain.

The last witness who cannot be bribed.

And maybe, 

after millions of years of evolution,

the body finally understood what humanity never did:

some things should not grow back.

Not because they cannot.

Because something already died there.

And the scar is the only thing left behind

that never learned how to lie.