My mother taught me not to relent when threatened
But not to threaten back, only to end
My feuds with morals and rhetoric
My dad finds it ironic that such a strapping young lad
Would think that rage and brute force are bad
Retaliations to a misdemeanor
Although this world is meaner, more eager
To laugh at tragic deaths of morality
And find a punchline in every fatality
Let alone babies who get concussed
Or wives who get battered
None of it mattered to people where I lived
I had the questionable shame of sitting
With a friend, whose written theses
Reeked of hypocrisy across from how he really thought
Instead of having gruntled moments I grunted
At his and his accomplices’ constant jabs
As they put me on the grand stage for their own pleasure
Years later, I measure such pain to the unit of how
I’m now under the shade of a fair and high tree
That my friends have for the past thousand days sown
I had a sense of cultural belonging
To two friends who have gone all the way
From their homeland full of democracy and liberty
To lands where gynophobia is treated as patriotic responsibility
One of them decided to treat me,
In the days when I needed no drama
Nor trauma, like a corrupt police officer
Judging me for having thoughts and decisions of my own
Since then, I have fought even harder
With the demons in my head
Enticing me to dread the unknown
And so it was, the last eve of eighteen
For three months and a fraction, I felt
An attraction to the idea
Of ending it all forever
And never looking back
Years later, I look and smile at the tree
And the kind tree smiles back at me
My pictures fell victim to the reach of goons
Who knew no mercy, and tricked me
Into blaming the three most fickle friends I knew
One blamed me for using my space to shine
Another framed me for self-inflicted bullying
And the third knew the perpetrators
But never, to this day, told me who they were
And when I’m left to my devices, I would have felt
Safe, knowing there’s nothing I could do to further protect myself
But who else do I expect to disdain me with such passion
When all I did was be me?
The tree now asks, “four years have gone by,
But did you, after all what you’ve seen, die?”
I look back to old school colleagues, presumed bullies
That I assume now did not intend to cast me out
Every day was about time to reconnect
With someone I thought, in my childhood, I knew
Yet my new acquaintances distract me from ever knowing
What they now think of me
The angry little creep
Whose ultimate wish was to belong
In a world he later saw to be cruel
One would be a fool to believe
That seeking comfort in rebuilding the shattered glass
That is the past
Would ever fulfill them
I want not to care
I want not to show empathy
I want not for things to concern me
I want not for things to crawl under my skin
And into my conscience
And dare I mention how the contrary is yet so true?
“Stop wanting to save the world,” they told me
I would gather an army just to shut you up
And prove to you that Hope is yet alive and burning
And no Demon can put it out
All hail the new King Hope
Who regardless of your needless input will reign supreme
And by this I do not mean
That those who disagree should be slain
Your lives may be now pointless, but not forever in vain
We shall teach you the way to mercy and compassion
Or perish with spears penetrating our flesh
And yet that is far from what I hope
I only think of breakfast to eat
That I’m unbothered enough to consume
That with a contented and joyful face I meet
My friends who showed me how it’s easy
To see progress in the depths of defeat
So leave me be, O wretched souls
With peace and kindness, you I greet