You sell your carefully curated sensuality
just to make your words worth hearing.
And yet, here you are,
screaming revolution.
Even the words
are embarrassed.
Thank God
the freedom fighters
had nothing to sell
but their lives
at the sacrificial altar of revolution.
Who knows —
otherwise,
they might have had to
rent out their skin
for independence.
The stranger came to the wedding
with the bride’s face.
Nobody noticed.
Her mother was busy
counting blessings.
Her father was busy
counting chairs.
The groom was busy
becoming a husband
in front of witnesses.
The stranger sat through the rituals,
accepted the food, the beverages,
clapped when everyone else did.
Then she climbed the staircase.
The bride followed.
Upstairs:
a bedroom,
a mirror,
a wardrobe
full of things the bride
hadn't worn in years.
The stranger took out
a red dress;
“too revealing,”
her mother had said.
A photograph;
her father had torn it
after finding her kissing
someone he didn't approve of.
A notebook;
her poems,
before people began asking
what they were about.
She put everything back.
“Who invited you?”
the bride asked, curious.
The stranger looked
toward the staircase,
“Everyone.”
She walked downstairs
wearing the bride’s face.
The bride stayed behind.
She looked into the mirror.
For the first time that day,
she didn't recognise herself.
Downstairs,
her new husband
was kissing a stranger,
as the room erupted into rehearsed applause.
If acquaintances were everything
they were supposed to be,
we wouldn't be handing out
loves and lives
to strangers.
If family were everything
we were told it is,
we wouldn't be learning from books
how to love ourselves.
And yet,
every time we desire,
every time we love or lust,
we rush to build familiarity,
brick by brick.
Perhaps that's the irony:
we distrust the people
we know by inheritance,
then spend our lives
trying to make intimates
of those we don't.
Human intelligence
is an evolutionary joke;
if only
we were self-aware.
