I’m all for it,
except that when it has really come down to the nitty-gritty,
the bits that need to be seen and not heard,
most have just wanted to make their voices loud and clear:
“I am implicitly evaluating your work on the basis of fear.”
Most have really just wanted to leave comments on my biceps,
requests for amendment on my penis
(they want a vagina instead, or maybe just less
oestrogenic testosterone, too crass)
or the space to say yes to a very brown chocolate gay man
who writes more abstracts in one day than most full tenured professors ever want to or can.
Then there are the self-hating,
the repressed, the endlessly dissipating:
your work is self-translated, or the wrong genre, or not quite complete.
your individuation theory is based on a coloniser’s way of thinking, a paradigm replete
with a barefaced ignorance of how academia itself came to be.
I know the language that abusive, irrational people speak.
I know the language of the undemocratic,
the needlessly technocratic,
the sighs of those left behind;
I absolutely know how to read between the lines.
Both groups above, the author might say,
really do need to live life a little more gay.
Read between my mind:
I review everything.
The response email, the call,
how easy it was for you to make gay and non-binary nothing at all.
How straightforward it can be to claim rationality;
to forsake what science itself has wrought,
and the rest of us are subject to for eternity:
hegemony
is apparently a dirty word;
but I, too, am a dirty, muddy boy,
and so what does dirty, mean, really
when I break out my kaleidoscope to annoy
you, and all you think you can see.
I see colour.
I see love.
I see empathy.
I take flight in fantasy.
I play coy.
I’ll go my own way and be better than everything you tried to destroy.
I have become isti chang
sa tigri.