Illustration by Yusuf Kidwai
There’s a dark sense of liberation
It’s the language of angry fists
Raised in the air
It’s the language of every blood type
Pooling in the road
This is the place we said we’d meet
If the day ever came
I’m waiting for the sun to come
To burn my shoulders
And cook my hair
I keep waiting for somebody’s son to come
And make me feel like I have tasted something to die for
But where is he?
When he comes around
Someone has to walk me Spanish down
Toward him
I can see the hunger there
A shining predator’s fur
Silk and lingerie on my breath
He can smell my fear
He knows what isn’t far off
And if ever the surgeon lays you down
On a hard bed
And straps down your head
Rest easy
It’s only open-heart surgery
And he went through many lives
Just to end up here inside you
There’s a dark spell before a nation falls to its knees
Anyone can reach out and feel the the storm
Swallow the electricity
Little boys run through walls of thunder like they were super-beings
And broken-hearted babies cry
Because of what the world is whispering
And when the little boys come through the fire
They have breathed the angry sky
And it stays locked up inside them
Until they can undo their flies
There’s a dark sense of liberation
Destination: dying free
New voices speak the language
Fists could speak so easily
Blood types start to harden
Into thicker stronger lines
And we join the growing laughter
To taste it rolling off our tongues
And the laughter falls down to our mothers
Breathing shallow in the dirt
All I really need to know though:
“Is this gonna hurt?”