I was not made to be broken.
I was made to live again.
No matter how many times they tore me from myself
I built myself back up, grain by grain of shining, shimmering sand.
And yet I desist.
Yet I cannot bring myself to insist
on revenge,
even when I hear your voices.
Even when I have no place to stand
no choice but to envision
what must have happened.
What you still say to me,
and what you must have said
in another universe
where Death might have allowed
a glimpse of the future:
500 years too late,
Merlionsman.
You are born 500 years from where I am.
One day in my future you will stand in the ruins of my endless, unbearable torture.
One day you will stand in the place
where my blood and sweat and tears and faeces have become a new cement.
One day you will see where they threw me into the sea,
dashed my babies against the walls,
cut off my legs. My destiny. My arms.
My land.
You are too late,
says the Fort of Saint George
to the Makaravedra. To the man
who is just a man. No god. No plan.
You seek to memorialise, little half-breed leader?
You can never turn back time.
You can never unenslave the dead.
And that is true,
I am no gay Eurasian space Jesus.
I can only report what I saw.
All I can mostly do is grieve.
All I can mostly do is live out the aftermath of this horror:
to say, and believe, and make sure---
Never.
Fucking.
Again.
But there is a little more, too.
An ideal. A way of decolonising my people, and still staying true
to who we are:
this Purple Dragon wants the story reframed. To be retold from the start.
Like Rilke, my probable pattern-friend said:
perhaps every dragon is a prince-princess who has lost their heart.
Tell me the story again, from the start.
Tell me how the exallos tried to reset human history all the way from the Neolithic ground up;
tell me how modern-day neocolonialism still exists. How modern-day slavery is still very much a part
of Singapore, and the rest of the Global North.
Some darknesses cannot be forgotten.
Some abuses still gush forth.
But all nights do end.
And, St George,
fucking listen here:
all lives
all freedom
and all Dragons
are ultimately worth everything, and more.
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