Constipation

I come from

two contrasting generations of sperm cells;

a grandfather

whose poetry and politics

were equally loud and boisterous,

and a father

who chose subtlety

when it came to both words and wings:

so subtle

he could flip sides

without twitching eyebrows.

I was twelve

when I realised

the reason my grandfather

doesn’t speak to his brothers

is that they chose

a different flavour of communism.

Same tree.

Different branches.

And yet

that was enough

to make the roots of blood tremble.

I was twelve

when I realised

politics and petrol

should never be left out in the open;

give them oxygen

and they will burn down

entire civilisations.

Two decades later,

it is compulsory

to be political.

And being it

is not enough.

You must declare it.

Perform it.

Repeat it

until your politics

becomes tinnitus

in the ears of everyone around you.

Question one side

and you are accused

of being the other, 

with assumptions

too starved

to scrape past elementary algebra.

Call yourself apolitical

and they look at you

as if they are civilisation

and you are the jungle.

You see,

I have a persistent problem.

On one side,

a faith 

that diagnoses change for cancer, 

that worships the past

in the present

as the only future.

On the other,

a faith 

that calls change the singular truth, 

even when it abandons logic,

even when they can't quite add it up.

And I keep wondering, 

why can sanity not live

on the fringes,

in the middle,

or beyond them?

Why must thought

always pick a uniform?

Why must disagreement

always declare allegiance?

In a world

that cannot stop

emptying itself

loudly, publicly, endlessly,

and every street

stinks of ideological diarrhoea,

I refuse to flow.

I choose

to be constipation.