Wore It With Pride
Not my 23 quadrillion badges of horror.
I wear those as I must. To commemorate the fallen
parts of who I was. The thorough
abuses that left me so broken and torn apart
that I thought I would never again see the sun.
Not the sun, either.
Not the light and flame that come straight into the heart, and lungs, and liver;
the 23 kidneys that every Kristang person has, to process all the abuse and trauma
thrown at us by you fools.
Not even the flowers,
though I do feel like a garden unto myself
with them across my body
which, in this regard, is my own property and fair use.
Maybe I am a gardener’s tools;
heavy-handed. Muscularly wrist-banded.
But not even those—
It is my skin, the colour of a rose
buried in the mud, and left to die,
and found, surprisingly, dead. Those
who left it there only know
why. But then—
then, and so it was, it really can be said
that it really did come to pass
that I was a rose from the dead,
and arose,
and sat up,
and said:
“Get up.
Your sins
never existed.
And so you could honestly
not be forgiven in the first place.
Live. Let what was bled away
be bled.”
My life has run away,
red, and white, and every other colour left
to me.
Brown boy,
stand up, every single fucking day,
and keep living your one, special, supermassive psychoemotional victory:
only you, therefore,
have ever been
the one garbed in your own amazing destiny.