I am running headlong into walls,
doors, streets, faces, places, storage areas that I should not have seen at all;
these are sites of projection and containment,
where my ancestors were imprisoned. And I don’t just mean the Kristang. I am talking about
before the Fall.
Before you made things descend into abusive insanity,
and when things once tended toward anything beyond
all of this. Toward something more.
Toward a greater call.
To a higher destiny, a sense of how to soar
among the clouds, and trees,
and fantasies
of one liberated from having to endure
your asymmetries.
Your parabolic, unfathomable mysteries
that deride the quality of the mind
the more one explores.
Luckily for me,
I know my boundaries;
I understand that beneath the flaws, the floors, the flowers
that snap and hiss at my feet
I can see something coming into view. Not destiny,
not fate, not faith, not history;
just a measure of what it means
to be me. What it means to be relief.
What it means to be truly great, by my own standards,
and by my own community’s.