If I forget

We survive or remain victims.

They talk to me, because of me, for me.

They take away my voice.

So I lie and wait for the paradise

They said would come

When things have changed.

It was too long in coming.

I learned to talk their way.

And we screamed

Sometime long ago,

Or maybe just yesterday

Against the --isms that choked us

Against how we were held captive

And molded the way we are now.

Yet it is the eloquence in the foreign language

That allows us to move comfortably in the world.

It is the faith that we cling to desperately

To save us from the pain when we fall

Even after all they have done,

And the high cost of believing

All that they have made us do

And give up, that carries us through.

The sanctuary of culture

Does not keep the vultures at bay.

They sweep our feet with sweet words

As the promises of traitorous lovers,

Yet we bed with them, a knife under the pillows

And kiss them goodnight.

Maybe we should’ve adapted better.

Kept the good, gotten rid of the bad

As we hold the cadence of our everyday.

Yet some turn into the monsters that we create,

Doing it the “right” way,

The most sell-out way.

Their reality comes first.

Who is it for, really, but ourselves

And the people we promised heaven to--

The believers, the seekers.

Who is to say one would not succumb

When the carrot that dangles is a

Promise of the life

They said we should have.

It is difficult to lose such luxury.

So we try to keep it.

We press the rose within the

Chapters of our lives,

So the middle and end of our story

Is the fairy tale they would approve of--

Never mind the bodies that we trip on,

Then trample, and the warning cuts

From the thorns of the flowers.

We walk by them or see them on the news

My clothes, my shoes and where I am going

Makes me different.

But I know that he, she, that child,

Could have been me.

I walked past them blindly.

I have more pressing matters to attend to.

We judge because there is always a choice,

Or so I was told

Between a red or yellow flower,

A rose against a gumamela

A dark or bright future.

And we condemn their choices

Because the choices have consequences

Of paradise. Of doom.

We choose to grab the chances

And navigate ourselves through.

Should we get lost, many are willing to guide us

Back to their own versions of the truth.

We find solace in blood, principle,

By the touch of a hand,

Or a slip of a moment

By the very sameness that made me

Avoid their eyes.

The heart chains our bodies

As the world drags us in all directions--

In the limbo of the urban jungle

The poverty and stillness in the provinces

The rat race

The prison of a cage where creativity is stifled

Yet pays what you owe to the world

To be alive.

We are saved by the memory of

The scent of the body that held us,

By the warmth that sheltered the whips

Of people’s tongues and disdain.

The love that told us

It is going to be okay.

And we believe

Because we are our own refuge