Tell me about the places we've been:
the lines you drew across
the body of my mind,
the islands where your fantasies,
forgotten and forsaken,
still wash ashore.
Tell me about how much you want me.
Tell me about how much you wanted me.
Tell me about desire,
and despair,
and destiny.
For I forgot my destiny in
the tenderness of our hours,
that Life you stole from them,
the destiny you ripped apart.
My therapist had to teach me
it wasn't real —
But I am Kristang.
Stubborn enough to forget to remember.
I wanted it to be real,
so I could remember
something else.
Anything else.
Because it's still there.
I still want that sweet, delicate binary.
The sinuous length, and
the halting breath, breezing over the hairs on my forearms,
tumbling around the first time
another boy was brave enough to want me back.
I want my spacetime back.
I want my multiverse back,
the one where everyone comes home;
the impossible one, where everyone who wants to gets to
Inhabit my seashores.
My mangroves.
Lie on the brown, earthen sands above the pulsar of my heart.
Smell the sea in my hair.
Star-burn beneath my forearms.
The sweat of my nightmares.
I want to be held,
scorchingly,
awkwardly, delicately, pseudoheterosexually.
I want to be held once again by a boy-friend,
emboldened by the hyphen preserving
the figments of his imaginimage,
who boldly knows
he has no idea what the hell he is doing
what the hell, and the hell, he will one day do
to me.
And maybe
one day, now,
he will do something
for himself.
Yudhishthira survived the Chuwafogu.
Kristang the state.
Kevin Martens the world, and the universe, and him.
Maybe one day he, too, will survive himself.
For I survived it all.
And I want my spacetime back.
My Life.
My body, all of it, armpits and nipples,
asscheeks and fingertips.
Everything you coveted.
Everything you colonised.
My islands.
My cosmos.
And I want what the universe wants back.
I want my friend back.
My brother,
my gay, hypercloseted brother.
Drop the fucking boy- from boy-friend.
Hey bro.
it's okay.
It's okay to finally be a man,
and tell me
what you need to tell me.
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