Inscriptions Of The Insignificant

Every time you ask me

why is it that I write,

I wish I could tell you

I write because words found me.

But a lie that heavy

needs the earth for a shoulder,

and all I have ever grown

were morsels of soil.

I wish I could tell you

I write because I love the way it feels

when what it feels

finds a way through my skin

to the skin of felled trees.

But then you'd never know

how badly I have hated writing,

how often I've wished it away

like a fever

I could sweat out by morning.

I wish I could tell you

I write because I've always wanted to,

because some things are born

already facing the sky.

But then how would you know

that I write

not because I want to,

but because I cannot not?

I write because it is the curse of my blood,

and the harder I try to wash it from my hands,

the more stubbornly the words return.

I write because my father didn't want me to.

I write because my mother didn't want me to.

I write because they burned my poems

and still could not ashen my poetry.

Some things survive fire

by becoming something fire cannot name.

I write because there were times

people walked away smiling,

leaving their little instruments of ruin

lodged somewhere between my ribs,

and I found more reasons to disappear

than to remain;

and when friends and family failed to bury me, 

words were my scalpel and spade,

my prescription and prayer.

I write because words are all that lie

between truth and lie,

and someone has to stand there

when the distance starts closing.

I write because if I didn't,

you would sell the world

every fiction of yours

and call them memories.

I write because someone has to

in a world busy

renting words for convenience,

where truth is expensive

and lies come home delivered free of cost.

Every time you ask

why is it that I write,

ask yourself:

if I didn't,

would you?

You can tell me

I'm a speck in the sand.

You wouldn't be wrong.

The sea has swallowed

better men than me.

But if I had to write

to become a bestseller,

I would become you,

and between the two of us

there would be

no tongues left unstained.

So no,

I don't write because I love writing.

I don't write because

I think the world needs another poet.

I don't even write

because I think I have something to say.

I write because silence

has always been too willing

to let the wrong people speak.

I write because somebody

has to clean the language

after the respectable have shit in it.

And if that makes me

nothing more than a speck in the sand,

so be it.

The sea can have the sand.

It can have the poets.

It can have the bestseller.

It can have every beautiful lie

ever written about why we write.

I'll take the shit.

I'll take the words

that won't wash clean.

I'll take the sentences

that leave blood under the fingernails.

I'll take the truth

that nobody wants to touch.

I write for the same reason

a sewer man cleans a commode.

Not because he loves the shit.

Because someone has to.

In Remembrance (Abridged)

My mother remembers

a child who lied.

My sister remembers

one who cried.

An old friend remembers

someone who stayed

long after he should have left.

Someone remembers

the night I left.

Someone else,

on that same night,

swears I never did.

I have stopped correcting them.

There are photographs

I cannot remember taking,

conversations I remember

that nobody else does,

and apologies

I am certain I received

from people who swear

they never said sorry.

For years,

I thought memory

was the only place

I was still myself.

Then I noticed

something terrible:

the older I get,

the more of my past

belongs to other people.

Their words

have entered my childhood.

Their anger

has edited my innocence.

Their forgiveness

has given me

things I may never

have earned.

Even the person

I call myself

is beginning to sound

like someone

I was told I was.

Sometimes I look

at an old photograph

and recognize the face

before I recognize the life.

How many times

can a person be remembered

before the memory

becomes the person?

In Remembrance

My mother remembers

a child who lied.

My sister remembers

one who cried.

An old friend remembers

someone who stayed

long after he should have left.

Someone remembers

the night I left.

Someone else,

on that same night,

swears I never did.

I have stopped correcting them.

There are photographs

I cannot remember taking,

a birthday I remember

ending in tears

though everyone remembers

the cake.

There is a house

I remember being afraid of

that everyone else remembers

as the happiest place

we ever lived.

There are conversations

I remember word for word

that nobody remembers having.

There are apologies

I am certain I received

from people who swear

they never said sorry.

For years,

I thought memory

was the one thing

no one could take from me.

I was wrong.

The older I get,

the more of my childhood

belongs to other people.

Their words

have entered my childhood.

Their anger

has edited my innocence.

Their forgiveness

has given me

things I may never

have earned.

Sometimes I remember

being happy

and cannot tell

if I was.

Sometimes I remember

being cruel

and cannot tell

if guilt is proof

or inheritance.

Even the person

I call myself

is beginning to sound

like someone

I was told I was.

Last December,

I found an old photograph

of myself at seven.

I knew the shirt.

I knew the room.

I knew the face.

I just couldn't remember

being the boy

inside it.

For a long time

I thought this meant

I had forgotten myself.

Now I think

I may have remembered

everyone else too well.

How many times

can a person be remembered

before the memory

becomes the person?

The Gentleman's Grammar

“But when she said no, I put it back,” he said,

almost convinced,

his eyes glittering with an island of newly found hope

in an ocean of what one would expect to be regret and shame,

but was mostly

the realisation of the bad luck of getting caught.

He spoke about his penis

like people speak about things

they're accused of misplacing.

He spoke of her pause before the refusal

like it was a waiting period 

he could utilise to win back a business deal.

He spoke of consent and of abuse

like they were metaphors:

subjective, 

negotiable, 

open to interpretation.

What can I say?

He was a veteran in the metaphorical department.

And like the weather gods at the meteorological department,

it was barely a surprise

that he would fail at his job rather spectacularly.

It's funny how we've been brought up

with an image of what monsters should look like:

loud,

ruthless,

unhinged.

The more I see humans,

the more convinced I become

that the worst of them

come in soft, tamed, well-behaved skins.

You need your prey to like you

before you can become its predator.

Apparently,

that is where evolution peaked.

He wasn't just another man.

What life would that even be?

He was a man of ethics,

of principles,

of revolutions.

A gentleman

drowning in a sea of women

tarnished by grains and specks

of uncouth penises

reeking of unbothered testosterone.

A gentleman

who had called me a misogynist

three weeks earlier,

who spoke of my arrogance

in arguing with a woman,

of my refusal to accept

that every last man

on the face of the planet

should be apologetic

and ashamed

of his very existence,

as though disagreement

were a misdemeanour,

and refusing to surrender

my sensibilities

to somebody else's dogmatic definition

of feminism

were a serious offence;

one that demanded exile.

As though an everyday disagreement

could be turned into a ticking bomb

of character definition,

one that would culminate

in the assassination

of the very character,

its identity,

and every life

caught inside its blast radius.

And don't we all know,

gentlemen don't rape.

Because how could they?

They're soft-spoken.

Agreeable.

Pleasant to talk to.

They feel good to be around.

Imagine if everything

that seemed and felt nice

were incapable of carrying disease.

How poorly

would a sexually transmitted disease

feel?

And who was I,

an oral cancer,

to judge him,

a fucking genital germ?

He was a gentleman

with a gentle penis

and gentler intentions.

Every time he touched a woman

with cheap liquor beneath his breath,

it was drunk affection.

Every time he described

his journey across the terrain of an unclothed woman's flesh

to another,

he was merely being a flirt.

Every time he pulled his penis out of his pants

in front of an unwilling woman,

it was just an error in punctuation.

And isn't that the trick?

We have become so accustomed to manicured manliness

that we mistake sheep's clothing for character.

The gentleman's voice is soft.

His hands are clean.

His vocabulary is polished.

His metaphors are well behaved.

Only the verbs misbehave.

Consent becomes a metaphor.

Violation becomes a misunderstanding.

Persistence becomes desire.

And a woman's refusal becomes an inconvenience to be negotiated.

Perhaps that is how a predator survives

in a world that insists

on recognising monsters by their manners.

He doesn't need to look monstrous.

He only needs to sound vulnerable.

And perhaps that is why the language matters.

Because once you crowd the noun with enough adjectives,

people stop asking what the verb did.

That is the genius of manicured manliness:

the sentence looks clean.

Even when the body does not. 

Especially when the body does not.

And somewhere between the two,

a gentleman has learned how to call his crime a metaphor.

I Write Because Hope Isn't An Excuse To Lie

I write because silence is where

the respectable lies go to die.

I write them back into daylight,

strip them of their manners,

and teach them their names.

I write until the anatomy of a lie

lies bare beneath the scalpel;

its polished teeth,

its borrowed spine,

its tongue still trying to call

cowardice compassion.

I keep cutting

until there is nowhere left

for butter-knived euphemisms to hide.

Until the lie is nothing

but marrow,

tissue,

and the small, cold machinery

of what we were too polite to call true.

I write because silence

doesn't make a lie less dead.

It only keeps the corpse respectable.

Barterhouse: Echoes Of The Unlaid

Had it not been

for the sheer inability of heterosexual men

to find their way into a woman's insides

without turning into hollowed-out echoes,

accountability might have been a non-negotiable

one couldn't barter away on the hopeful premise of sex.

Perhaps then, 

a woman's promise of access

would have stopped buying exemptions.

Perhaps virginity 

would have lost its exchange rate.

Perhaps the boys would have learned

that being wanted does not make consequence optional.

And maybe, just maybe,

all those boys in men's cloaks

would have stopped sounding the same;

all appetite,

all grievance,

all convenient innocence,

all discovering principles

only after being denied what they wanted.

The unlaid were never the tragedy.

It was the bargaining.

The Peopleworms

Tapeworms are rather fascinating

for existences inhabiting

the whereabouts of your asshole.

They prefer their fodder predigested;

digestion requires gall,

and pretense makes for poor enzymes.

They call themselves witches,

rather proudly.

Mind control is the only magic a parasite can afford;

they kill the entrails that keep them alive,

fornicate over corpses,

then mistake the rot for conquest.

Necrophiles, quite literally.

Tapeworms like to imagine themselves as magic,

until they trickle down,

gather,

and become

what they always were:

pieces of shit.

Sometimes, they call themselves people.