The wound is bleeding inwards

It hooves and jives and sucks on our thumbs like pacifiers

Calls us mother, begs to bleed our tits into bone, choking on our milk

Wet diapers cooling at the bantaba, this wound climbing our sink step by step

By morning it has learned to wash its hands in our water

 

The wound is your brother’s friend

The wound is your brother’s friend who is a rapist

Who is invited against your welcome, uproots you like a thorn

Throws his shoes where your pillows lay, ties your underwear around your wrist

Blames your shorts, your scrubbed lips, your welcoming smile, your nail polish

For making a demon out of him, he asks if you enjoyed it

And your tears respond while he climbs down your bed

Don’t he know

He has made a coffin out of your bed and planted a rock to sleep in your throat

Don’t he know long after he leaves, your body keeps setting a plate for his scent

 

The wound is a thief in the night

Leaves a knife scar on your curtains

Begs to turn your ocean into a barren desert, trips your legos

Looks at us slaving and sweating and starving while he sleeps all day

With his mouth like that of our king, feeding on our empty

Emptying our hearts beneath our snoring, as we

Count the ceiling cracks like unpaid debts

He was gone

But I was still there

 

The wound is a future kerfuffling with a boy’s dream

Too large for his city, crawling like an ant wherever sugar is promised

Lays his desires like bread crumbs in his palms while pigeons feed on it

First a tourist on this land, then a student on this land, then a refugee

His only curse is, he is a boy who desires to touch the magic of another boy

Starves his eyes open for nearly two years

At the refugee camps, going camp to camp

To Ter Apel

To Budel

To Drachten

To Wageningen

To Nijmegen

To Arnhem

To Almere

 

The wound is not the whole body

It is a thirsty limb made to look like coal outgrowing its own remembering

A scrubbed lips, a hand losing its grip

A breath like matches cradling an entire forest in vertigo

With lonely white men loaning him their kindness, and

Naming him at any drop to aggrandize and congratulate themselves

 

Every water has forgotten, and every tree now stands with a mouth full of smoke

Who, who wounds a land and its people and still claim human

Who teaches a boy the sound of a gun

And turn his heart and tongue into a pistol

Into a fist

 

The wound is the man at the white office

Raised by a single mother, but makes a wound out of her

Laid to rot in her coffin and all who is after her too

Scallion kiss boiling a hard stone to bleed, sits to orchestrate wars with

A glass of the screaming eagle cabernet sauvignon 1992 in his hands

And he sings and jives and curses and shoots and tells about his two tiny scars

 

How many sand roads equals a fist, a blow torch, a machine gun against a school child

We have carried this fire for so long and mistaken its heat for blood

 

The wound is a fire that needs to be put out

Unclenched by its own kindness, I tell you we are able to touch our own faces again

Unabashed while we untangle ourselves and rest in flesh and silk and brown waters

 

Do not choke your own life or become that which wounds you

You’ll find out in this wound, we can breathe too, although

Tender and discouraged, but the fight history as it carries us must not shape us

 

Our dance is pummelling with rust, and we move everything we own on trays

Lock them in coffins, we are not born to put out forest fires and men

We are not born to be gang banged and bleed our red paint on this earth

 

Age must suck us dry, but until then we must privilege on each day

We must not die by our own hands, after war there will be love again

 

Ha, my wound is making a wound out of itself

This new wound, it does not know our history yet

It only knows that morning keeps arriving with its foolish hands full of light

 

And I, I am grateful

I am grateful I am growing past my own knowledge

Becoming anything, becoming something

That opens the windows despite everything

 

Yet! there is something

There is everything about this wound that will nott be forgotten