Sing me your pains
as I close my eyes
and let the night fool me
into believing that I understand
Sing me a lullaby
that tells a story
how your countrymen fought
how your country lost
count of the bodies
that had to be surrendered
In exchange
of something more valuable than oil
but cannot even capture
the magnitude of my rage
the length of my despair
that goes from west
and does not even end in east
Sing me your goodbyes
that cannot be contained
in words, in rhythms
Some endings are far
too painful than just the end
because the beginning
Of another
is what wrecks
the life that has been
the song of pain
that has given life
the lullaby that
has cradled a nation to sleep
the goodbyes
That opened
the holes never ending
How painstaking it is to live in a time when the world is asking your identity in exchange of the mundane. Let this be my rage directed at myself for my being will succumb, and my entirety will be reduced. All of these, I will know, but I may not have the power to resist. All of these I will know, and that is the most painful, most shameful truth to my being.
I gave myself away, despite knowing what was at cost.
I will not forgive myself, nor should you. For a morning will come, and we will grapple with confusion – whose decision was it to buy this blue shirt that never matched your eyes? Whose decision was it that you settle in this subdivision, with this car, this job, and this, and everything? A morning will come, and you will feel a stabbing sensation on your back, and you will never be able to rest. No. Your back will never taste, nor feel the comfort you used to enjoy. Your back will hurt as reminder of how you turned your back to the things you knew, and probably was able to fight. Your back will always hurt, and you will always feel on the edge of life, and giving up. Because you turned down the fight. You could have won. You could have created a small mess that delayed the fruition of nothingness.
But you did not. For the world decided to take that path, and you accepted that you are but only one. You did not ask the man beside you. You did not explain what you knew to your sister, nor your friend. No, you kept it all in, because you did not have the courage to tell them that the world is crumbling down, and eating our identities. You did not have the spine to tell them, because you were guilty of reducing people to binaries, to codes, to systems, to models. To anything but human.
It will haunt you, even in the sweetest night of your wedding. It will whisper the nights you gave up, and the mornings you ignored. It will shackle you down, and even deeper as you try to hide yourself. You should have gone out, and told as many as you could. But you hid, and hoped that someone else will tell the world that we are being robbed, and we are surrendering our agency to institutions who wanted nothing but to profit out of our humanity.
As I blow my 28th birthday candle, let it be my reminder of my own ignorance – that many days, I forgot my own fight. That many times, I hid instead of exposing the narrative. The narrative less known today, but in years to come, the new generations will point finger at us.
For we knew, but we did not move.
WEARENOTDATA 