I don’t want to be your diversity today. Some days I just need to be another brown voice among brown voices. I need to speak in my native tongue. I need to be comfortable in a world devoid of anthropologists.
I don’t want to be here to amuse nor do I want to take myself so seriously. Nor be taken as such either.
What are the other alternatives?
I’d take it back and ask to be included if I wasn’t so worried about being a spokesman when as a spokesperson I already know my notions lack a certain normal certain rooms are looking for.
I can’t ignore the unspoken prologue to every conversation.
I don’t want to walk away apologizing anymore.
I don’t trust anybody when it comes to careful inclusion.
I’m not asking for respite. I’m just biding my time in my head. Doing my own time in my own head then among my folks so I can get back with an answer that speaks to an individuality which in itself is also a duality.
*
gimme a second
of safety
.
let me sleep a little longer
in the comfort
of my commonality
.
let my lack of money
let me rest easy
knowing I have nothing better to do
*
this house smells of some shit I didn’t really enjoy eating yesterday.
*
when do I get to be a tourist?
.
I’m worried. My mom was paranoid and she passed it on to me. She knew. She cried. It was her way of flushing out the idea of impending doom. She knew she could flood the bathroom in a sea of herself and then come back out as if she just discovered the rest of the house. She taught me everything I didn’t know I could handle. She’s dead now and her worries were willed to me and stay with me and my feet are soaked in her ghost tears still falling in every restroom I’ve ever occupied. Alone, we’re imagining the worst. We know we’re being haunted and she haunts me.
*
I want to go someplace new
.
my dad was tapped into too many phones at one time. he heard too many conversations. he tried to hang up on them but they weren’t having it and his knife didn’t do its job. he lived. he lives. he survives. I survived him.
*
everything I do
is a secret
shared openly
behind my back
.
shame is a hobby
I can’t give up
.
I switch gears pretty quickly because I don’t want to be responsible for idle machines.
.
I’d prefer
to give the impression
of something else
but this body
rejects my request
.
I have not become what I was born to be. My experiences went to war with my breeding and neither side won.
*
it’s too much
to tell you
today
it’s not in me
right now
to let you in
I can’t
.
It’s a world of closed doors. I know because I shut them. I needed some space. A wormhole. A singularity. An event horizon. A something too geeky to explain here in this world of diversity where nobody understands what I am trying to say even as I keep trying.
.
I was born
of too many halves
I don’t know how
certain fractions
convert
but something doesn’t add up
.
I’m a melting pot. You’re a melting pot. Together we are cauldrons in a guild or coven or somewhere pots go to congregate.
a kitchen
.
we don’t know each other’s contents
we haven’t had that talk yet
haven’t yet begun
to become the spill
we need to be
.
a mess of equal difficulty to clean
.
and in silence when may I learn to enjoy this room when it is ready to be shared?