The High Priestess Of Pretend Halos

Biology says I'm weeks away from menopause

but I've always had an aversion to uncomfortable truths

so I walk around with the angst of teenage drama. 

My father's lack of teeth is what I build my feminist out of

but I never forget to use his surname, 

you see I come from a long lineage of caste supremacy and an inherent sense of superiority for simply existing, 

and that's not a vice you can do away with; take away illusion and what is a magician left with?

I bleed every month for the dying and the decaying in Gaza, 

and I sell my support for Umar Khalid,

like that's all it takes to be called a revolutionary, 

but every time the country of Umar Khalid and of me, bleeds, 

I forget my words, because I can't afford to lose my teeth, 

because how does a snake continue to be a snake without its fangs?

I use my dysfunctional family as puppets to further my paper propaganda, 

and I chew my words, enunciating them with enough conviction

so no one dares question my intellect.

I don't have a spine so I offer unsolicited advice as a guise to latch my parasitic intentions on to, 

and before you realise, I would have crept so far up your ribs, 

you'd have to asphyxiate yourself to get rid of me.

Penises are my choice of scapegoats, 

I sever them, at the very first chance I get,

because butchery is all I really have, in the name of art. 

And, art is the dildo

I orgasm my casteist conscience to, every night, in the warmth of my cold bed.

I only flock myself with women two-thirds my age or younger, 

because the ones my age wake up to real-life consequences, 

and I am rather allergic to anything that questions the imagined Renaissance I'm the Michelangelo and the Da Vinci of.

Either them, or the men who've absolved themselves of their Y-chromosomes, 

the ones who have wrung themselves dry of the last traces of testosterone, and I'm the only one reeking of it

because in a congregation of flaccid penises, my clitoris becomes the only permissible erection, 

and that's how I like my feminism.

I breathe carbon monoxide into falsified vendettas, 

because it's twice the convenience;

it rids any spine with a penis I couldn't rid in person, 

and I am never cutting losses if and when the tables turn.

Call me whatever you like —

activist, artist, intellectual, revolutionary. 

Just don't call me honest.

I have spent a lifetime

mistaking manufactured applause for a mirror.