Dear mother,
your bird in a cage wouldn’t grow… only age.
Wrapping it in a veil wouldn’t keep it from realising that life is but a stage.
Making it memorise a book you find holy page by page
won’t keep it from flying out your nest in rage.
Only to the liberty of questioning I want to be engaged.
Weep not, mother, that I shall never marry,
for only you and my father, as my children, I would carry.
Dear father,
you were proud of your daughter
when professors at her university applauded her.
But it is that version of her that she had to slaughter
to bring out your artistic genes and what your love taught her.
A heavenly haven for my childhood you have made,
but the value of an art piece is born when it is displayed.
Dear brother,
After 12 years, I reached you breathless.
My guilt, shame, and trauma rendered my truth speechless.
The country threw me to you a bird with an infection…
Flightless.
I had to kill who I was misled to think she was me
and only then I had a taste of what it means to be free.
It wasn’t leaving the country or reaching you here.
It was the free fall into the deepest core of my fears.
Dear Distorted Image of Allah,
I forgive you.
I find the Truth within me, inshallah.
Dear gynecologist,
my whole life I’ve been pregnant…
Stamped by belief-systems: « Mutant. »
A tumor in their network gone malignant.
Raped by hands that claimed they were transcendent
when the only part of each hand that was present
was a middle finger full of resentment.
Never had the chance to give birth under their rigid treatment.
And once I did, they judge what came out of me: illusion-resistant.
Dead is the mother,
the past me,
and everborn is her newborn,
the thing writing poetry here.
Dear psychiatrist,
wrote you a list of all my symptoms. You never read it.
Derealization-Depersonalization, depression, psychosis, and two attempts of suicide.
Numb me not with your medicine, the symptoms this way would not subside.
I have no idea how this medicine got legalised
when nature’s healing in our medical literature is read as an ancient lie.
I leave your decorated office more willing to die
unable to articulate to you the many of me in my mind.
Dear First Psychologist,
it seems you view your profession as a tea-talk game,
for in the second session, you asked me what was my name.
Dear Poetry Slams’ Hosts,
I have no idea how I ended up here…
Each and every event could be a big scam
to capture me, get rid of this societal mutation. Shoot down the migrating bird: Bam Bam!
« To hell with this mad infection! Flying around, not giving a damn!
Hunting for staged expressions, storytellers, and slams!
Ridiculing the wealthy wine drinkers
and dancing barefoot to the music of every jam! »
I am overtaken by fresh flow, and then you ask me for poems before this mic-stand.
I can’t help but write ones anew. My thoughts stumble down my sick mind and get crammed.
My emotions crash one another in a mosh pit with the past voices going sirens in my mind:
« Haram! Haram! »
« Your hair is out! Haram! »
« Your voice is heard! Haram! »
« Your skin is seen! Haram! »
Well, Haram is your Haram!
For it seems God made what I am a Haram.
Then, a devotee from my country plays God’s role, sits me down
asks me « You’re a woman or a man? »
Well, a woman who’s a man, madam.
I guess it makes me wanted by your people now.
Dear Mother, Father,
Brother, and every Lover,
worry not, I am fine.
At lass, I can play in this life, the role of a mime.
No need for words. You can live it through my eyes.
It is the experience that is sublime.
Limitless, for I have touched on Godhood. It is in my core.
I’m a trip. The forgetful reincarnation with the sole purpose to explore.
Not my body, my gender, my country, or its war.
There remains no « I » or « me » anymore.
At last. Whole.