Poesiaeunoia
You were my home;
not you, Eunoia. You have already been lost from view.
I’m talking about
whatever I want to talk about.
Whomever I want you
to be. It’s a poem. It has to also simultaneously
be true.
So it goes:
the hope.
The good news.
The songs that we shared.
The ways that you made me sometimes shout
and let my tears slide free,
for love that I believed was true.
For saudadi. For letting me know that a little gay brown Kristang boy
was worth it all. I still remember
what you felt like, on that first night,
when I took off all my clothes and let myself be nude
in the way those in power have always implied was right;
and there you were next to me.
It was natural. It was intentional. It was two
of us.
It was beautiful.
And I survived
the way that that feeling
still takes it all away from me,
and still throws it in the lake,
and still claims
victory.
I go swimming, not out of hate,
but because I want you to not be fake
with me anymore. I want some good old-fashioned
Kristang metanoia
to run through my body.
Nicomacheanically
it could be made
into a new kind of beauty.
I live, as always
in hope.
I live, knowing that
what was left behind
could still flow into new life;
could still become somewhere that both of us
could go.
Knowing that what might be redefined
could still be something that could also explode
into a real sense that we have moved time and space
to be present with each other.
I have climbed mountains, resurrected languages, written 640 poems,
and this is all I know:
that love, and faith, and hope, and fortune:
these are, indeed,
the mind, and heart, and soul, and body’s
strangest, most bizarrely wondrous powers.
To be Kristang in this dimension, now,
is not to say I am sorry,
but to come to an ever more metacognitively metacognitive realisation
that I was chasing the same Dark Tower
as Rand.
That in the end, it was all only ever worth
a couple of lines in the sand
and on the Substack;
a fleeting, most bittersweetly lonely
flower.