Memento mori, remember death.
Do you remember life in death? I remember death in life.
A body tortured is no longer your body.
It is the body politic.
It is a dumb world.
The women who bring us bread and little chocolates say they bear witness to our suffering.
I bear witness to my suffering, I say, but don’t forget us.
What if I were blind and deaf, could I bear witness, would I know injustice?
If my body is starved and battered, I bear witness.
In the past, lives hung on the words of philosophers, now they hang on bits of cryptocode, gone are the men of grand thinking and dialectical ingenuity, arrived are the men of lazy hearts and juvenile souls wanting to colonize a galaxy like a frenetic, elitist video game.
I wake up and compose these words on the back of cereal boxes from the Red Cross-
Biting the heart of the tired river, it swells and moves, slowly, achingly so, it’s faceless and silent, its words abducted in the bleak night, scratch the black soil, the wounds unfold, my menstrual blood dripping like terrible tears, my womanhood dying.
This is my home, the desolate mosque echoes the voice of prayer, the church is shuttered, the synagogue exhales smoke, my pleas unheard, ‘take me, take me’, a brutal incantation, the sky is vacant, the hand of God is broken, pounded by marching boots, Hades erupts, steals me, flowers squashed in my hands.
Nelumbo Nucifera, lotus, one blossom – drops thousands of seeds – annum, falling, drifting, bottom of ponds, silty plains, it grows by the banks, I want to tear it out, the cycle is unending, circling, the soldier’s vodka heavy breath, spittle leaks, seed coats my womb.
Wire girded camp, we are nothing more than cattle, they taunt us, torture us, we lay down for the punishment, the men who know no boundaries, where evil flowers gain sustenance, I cry in the night, my face a stone in the morning, I etch in the dirt, my body is a crime.
My voice cracks across the chasm, the universe munches time.
The end –
The women imprisoned with me are quite young, they have synaptic devices in their brains that electrocutes them when they think unfavorably of the Power so that when the Power rapes them they force themselves to feel love for the Power to avoid pain and this makes them wretched because they have forgotten what actual love is.
I know of no greater corruption or injustice.
This is true.
You cannot make Power feel shame even when it is toppled and vilified because Power is not like you and me, Power licks its wounds in the shadows until it reigns again because Power is never vanquished and its rotted core rolls onto the world stage and feeds the jackals with its rotted flesh decked in silk pledging its nothing heart to a movement moved by virulent anger.
They look at me.
My body is a crime.
‘You’re very unlucky’, they whisper through the bars of my cell.
‘You’re why I’m unlucky, my body is proof of your crime’, I disrobe and prove my wounds.
They deeply chuckle, quaking chins of fat. ‘But you’re the criminal’.
I stop speaking.
It is a dumb world.
Hypocrisy renders discourse senseless.
It’s a feeling that pulls in your gut, gives the urge to vomit until it becomes an urge to cry, but that’s the power of Power, to own your body, to make you helpless in your body, which is a type of crime.
I mark the cell wall, one day closer to freedom or continued incarceration, my life ebbs, like a tide never to return, and I can see the trillionaires swim in diamond dust, syphoning the coastal plain into Swiss bank accounts, they anchor yachts in coastal swells, that causes waves to drown the poor, and servants pluck the bodies for midnight roasts served in scallop shells.
Now.
The wind carries mist from the river, rose petals blot the sky.
I see the Power playing gin rummy on rusted garbage bins.
I line up with the women in the yard, bitterness dissolves when a pale petal lands on my hand.
I live for one more day, my body sighs.