I’m More Alive Than I Am Afraid
After Hala
Despair is never a prophecy of will
we’ve been roped into an ineluctable
universe, propped up & charaded
by haste, greed & Biblical levels
of genocide.
What say you,
sons of Abraham,
how did thee herald in the new age?
Struck hungry with skin & bones
I’m bored by American twee,
hands locked behind one’s back,
in a torrid embrace,
denial, a right to be.
Tenuous narcissism stokes
the Liberal’s heart;
as Orwell evoked, ignorance is bliss.
The ululation moves through me,
the vibration hits
like the vibrato tongue
cobalt, like a hiss.
The anger seethes
like a nightingale
I hate how righteous
capitalism makes us
how ill-willed
& frantic we move
with no remorse
& no reflection, too.
We have grown
hard-hearted & stale
we’ve sucked the earth bone dry
polluting her rivers, a succubus to the
plants leaving her now
lacklustre and pale.
I am hurt by the dissonance, coy
how humans forget that there is
but one God—time is running out
I wonder what it will take for us
to become a people who honor death
who then thereby
love life and never toy
with the deep mystery
of mortality
& how this life surges
from one current to the next
hoping for better will,
for a new honorable day.
I am tilling the soil to cherish
every moment with her dirt,
with this apricot heart,
the way earth smells
holy & clean
iron packed like blood,
purified by our display
of commitment & resilience
to revise our insolence.
A garden blooms everytime
I look at you,
I call this worship,
how the wind is so urgent,
the fire so radiant,
water swallowed by memory,
trees earth struck,
rooted like a banyan,
cascading
on those Gangetic plains.
I smell the forest,
bright and high,
resin-dew,
sap-like leaves
fresh as fresh can be.
The camphor burns
and I sit like a lotus,
a shapla phool,
sun beaten and sugar rushed.
May my body feed millions,
stretched out like an orange rind,
unbound, the tang of crushed peaches,
let my body, this body of clay,
mean something in this
life to the next,
open, willful, humble.
I am ready to be compost,
Chris Abani writes:
“this slow decomposition that is /life.”
I lean towards optimism,
there is a new day,
but death will find you, find us,
& how will we arrive
at that horizon?
In this remembering
we can find life,
miraculous, like the sun,
astonishing in its orbital,
O Moon,
my ruler, how I’ll flutter at your loss,
how the cosmos tastes
sacred
when you understand that this
life is but just one & yet,
even still
I have learned to love
heart aflame.
My anecdote to pain
has been to love harder.
Nobody showed me this way,
I found my way back to you
on my own, knowing my compass,
drawing commisersation
from Joan, your divine servant.
I have always heard you God
beckon me bright,
my heart asunder, freedom is
loving myself & giving my all
to this great earth
knowing no matter what comes
I did what I came here to do,
to liberate myself.
May this space & time
continuum
remember that I was here
& that, despite it all,
there was always love.
Burn brighter soul, for
how astonishing a thing,
that no matter what,
love is remarkable
because it carries,
because it remains.
you are a flow(er) a'bloom..
thank you for sharing your seeds and nurturing our soils..
“hoping for better will,” so thankful for your apricot heart 🫶🏾