The way in can be treacherous;
I am not maid
light enough,
and no, I never will be.
I am a man:
brown and boisterous,
buff and ebuillent,
bold and branksomely beautiful.
Made of brick and baked, browning, bulldozed earth.
So bulldoze through me
and my bustling, teeming trauma.
Burst through my balustrades.
Buck up my bounteous, beckoning bastions.
You know who can't bear it?
Those who have forgotten
how they can be made whole.
Because buried within me
is wholly a part of you:
the first city you laid bare,
entombed beneath my sands.
In your earlier expeditions,
you never found Babylon,
or Babel,
or even the Khar-Toba.
For I am made of far braver stuff
then shame, and self-loathing, and silence.
Bomong brani.
I have been silenced before.
We have been silenced before.
When instead
we were made to be born, over and over again,
in breathing, burning body,
majestic mind,
and heaving, humid heart.
And suffer not, most of all, the savage, self-sanctimonising soul.
I open to you in breathy, breathtaking brilliance.
You claim there is nothing more hedonistic;
but little did you know
that after the burning of my own Alexandria
I claimed my body, bicephalon and biceps all for myself.
So now I am fish and lion,
man and maiden,
water-bearer, and water itself,
incomplete and whole.
Make yourself complete to me.
Make yourself whole to me.
Break the confines of brinksmanship
and bank on up behind me.
The river is wide.
The lagoon yearning, and rich,
and teeming with breem and brown, burning, bubbling body.
The mangroves fertile soil, and farandolic soul.
This man growing, and growling, and giving all he can
to become Dreamtiger.
Descend into my depths.
Darken my skin as you bathe me in the briefest of luscious, lonely beckoning.
Discover what lies beneath it all:
An abatement of blind ignorance.
Breastful, brawny, intricate, inundating beauty.
Big, non-binary arms, and bigger, bulkier, blazing dreams —
a belly of balefire,
swift, spurting, and scorching away every stereotype and shame,
every second spent seeking a way to strip away your sins,
every sorrow at who you are.
I receive nothing
except your release.
I reject everything
except the way it feels
to find those sweet, fragrant, pheromonomic furrows
in the folds where your courage
is once again able to grow
grave, gay and gaudily glorious.
A Dreamtiger accepts nothing
except a dream of you and me redefined,
reinvigorated,
regenerated,
reembodied,
you inside me,
and I inside you, being made whole again.
Whole, you used to say,
battling the bitter, buoyant terror of who you really are.
How does this make me whole?
And I?
I battle nothing
except the urge to say more.
For this is all a Dreamtiger needs to say:
They used to say you would have made me a maiden;
and so you have.
For in every unmaking
you made me more
than any man could ever have dreamed of being.