Embers II

Sitting with the small fact about me that
I used to want blonde hair and blue eyes
So it was. A glitch. Can you see her? This blonde woman with blue eyes. Desiring her is a young act of falling away from myself.

When I catch my reflection in a window in Deptford market, I shudder. These moments are when I glitch. This is when I slip…
I often wonder what brown person in history I could be mistaken for. My brown-ness falling into anonymity. The cultural washing of ‘blackness’ we all look the same – are you two – me and another mixed-race person standing in a canteen queue – sisters? Is my imagined blonde haired companion also a sister?

Can you see her? This blonde woman with blue eyes. She stands in the shadow of the door for a while before going to stand in the shadow of her mother.

Is she trying to capture loss fleeing uncontrollably?
Is she trying to have the resilience found in nature?
Is she meeting her emptiness?
Is she cruel and comforting?

Perhaps she is sucking the last juice of a sugar cane?

Perhaps she is krumping?

Perhaps she is twerking…slowly.

What if this becomes a study in being seen?
What if the filter comes off?

In 1987, i screamed out into the world.
One lung collapsed, skin yellowed by organ failure,

fitting in one palm of a hand.
Instantaneously, i.

i grow, i quieten,
i begin collecting.

Later, my reflection splinters into monsters of my own and others making.

without myself
i swim to the horizon
in search of misty, grey-blue safety,
to listen to gut-voices.

the self-shouting-ragin’,
dis-together
un-integrated,
non-collective of bone-muscle, energy and emotion.

In the many of life’s aftermaths,
i encounter internalised ponds of splitting from oneself
(dealing-leaning amidst a site uninhabitable)
as i prickle into stretching backspace and
a hip opener
where the danger, the past,
gushes through openings forced in the dark.

i fear the dive into the dark.