To The Women Who Use Feminism Like Barricades & Throw It Like Grenades

I want you to know, I know.

I know you are not feminists.

I know you are nothing like feminists.

I can smell your rehearsed disgust

for a gender you have neither lived nor loved.

And while you insist you survived men,

you have mostly used them

as caricatures in stories of your battle scars;

the same scars you inherited

from mothers and grandmothers

like trauma was a family heirloom

stitched into the skin.

I can see through your audacious eye-rolls,

basking in victories

borrowed from books

borrowed from friends

who borrowed them from another century.

Every passing day,

you collect rage

like public toilets collect change at the entrance,

and by the end of the week,

as your jean pockets clink and clatter,

you write poetry

about the rattling noise of shackles.

I can hear through your loudly hollow screams;

the ones visible in your epiglottis

but never in your spine.

Because calloused hands and battered bones

are not beautiful.

And revolutions, contrary to what you were told,

rarely survive air-conditioning.

Ever since you read Lady Lazarus,

you have mistaken feminists for phoenixes.

But Sylvia Plath lived her metaphors,

and you can barely survive your scribbles.

You think you will burn men

and rise from their ashes.

But if you truly understood metaphor,

you would not have to torment your tonsils

to manufacture one.

I want you to know, I know.

I know who you are.

I know what you are.

I can smell the scorn in your breath

like the stupor of a functioning alcoholic;

worn in crimson lipstick

the way lions wear vanity in their mane.

You walk with the air

you imagine warriors walk with,

because seeing one

is largely impermissible

through rose-wine evenings

and air-conditioned rebellion.

So you call it sisterhood

and inherit victories by association,

as though courage were contagious

and suffering transferable through proximity.

I can see the lies

you tell the world,

and yourself a little more carefully.

Because intoxication is important.

One must remain allergic to daylight.

And it is imperative

the world mistakes insecurity for mystique.

So the closer sobriety approaches,

the more the cracks begin appearing;

small and sudden

like acne before photographs.

And every last shred of logic and reason

is drowned quietly,

because once a person learns

to deny existence despite evidence,

invincibility becomes

a remarkably achievable magic trick.

I can hear through the corridors

of your pedicured pedagogy

and manicured mannequin existence;

almost as though feminists

were not flesh and blood

but carefully typed placeholders

for fashionable suffering.

Because humans are fragile,

and fragility is inconvenient

to those who masturbate

to weaponised vulnerability

like it were a revolutionary act.

But then,

when has truth ever inconvenienced

plastic prophets?

And when has the food chain

ever bothered vegan vigilantes

choking politely

on tofu and almond milk?

I want you to know, I know.

I know what you think of men like me.

I know you want to burn me,

because burials are never proof enough of death

for vermin like me.

I know you want me erased,

because even the silence of a question mark

feels intolerably audacious

inside republics built from feelings.

I know you want every trace of me gone,

because germs like me

have an ugly habit

of returning from nothing.

I want you to know, I know.

I want you to know, 

it troubles me

about as much

as your housemaid’s menstrual cycle

interrupts your good night’s sleep.