a watered down and greenwashed
version of myself.
Pastel pink and grey walls,
white oleanders
in the leafy green garden —
I’m grateful I can return home.
Let me hide in the closet
in my bedroom, as I
hug my knees to my chest
in the greyness of four am,
breathing.
I strangled the poet in me
and now face a life sentence
in the black hole in my own head.
I’m as guilty as the moonlight,
which is to say that I’m really not.
My fingers can’t write
of the soft and sanguine
when an entire people
is about to live in history,
only in the past tense.
I cannot sleep at night.
A patch in the bedroom plaster
looks like a gray mouse in a white
house and maybe that would stop
the genocide and I’m left
wondering why our love for Earth
is so all-consuming that
we devour her and spit out bones
to leave behind a graveyard
for the children,
of the children.
Let me stay until the warplanes
are silent and the horizon
is no longer covered
with crimson clouds and blood rain.
Then, I’ll leave with the Lego set
of my childhood, so that I may
build this world again.