April 25: Other Languages

Translation
feels a lot like love.

The same kind of tender compromise,
sense of urgency, hollow regret. The
feeling you don't own your mouth.

There are a hundred reasons
I will never feel whole; one
of them is that I am split
right through my voice
like an overripe fruit,
my syllables torn in two
like rotting flesh on seed.

With vowels that came
to me as easy as love,
I was pulled in
to a universe that sank
under my skin and named
my teeth its own. This language
owns my soul, owns the cities
in my belly, writes the laws that
govern the streets of my voice.

I write only that poetry
which I can fit in the confines
of this language, in its particular
lilt, in the silences between
black alphabets that tell me
they don't belong in this
humid tragedy. I write
only those words which
this language lets me own.
I write a syntax of desire
and living, bruising and
falling, trying and loving.
I write only the words
I can call my own.
Even those words
sometimes slip through
my fingers and mock
my little brown voice.

Other languages hang around in
the air, a distant memory, a short
forgetting. Other languages are
hesitant on my tongue, in my mouth
that tastes of a ruined empire. I try
to tell them they can own me too,
hold me tender in the sounds of
their words and their weeping.
Other languages know parts
of me that I have hidden away,
buried under soil and tried to
forget. Other languages know
the blood that runs through
my voice, the archeology
of my expression, the way
I might never know.

I don't know whether they
are jealous, of this mistress
that scratches my voice
when I try to let it go.
I don't know whether
they want me, like I
think I want them.

Translation
feels like looking
at myself in the dark.
Like counting the colours
of my shadows. Like taking
the shortest way home in a
monsoon that smells of a
different life. Translation
feels like violation, feels
sacred, feels like drowning.

I unveil a secret
that knows my name.
I hang somewhere
between my voice
and my soul that
smells of centuries
in the sun, here,
here where you
see the roads and
towers now, here.
Here, where I lived
before I lived, where
the soil dreamed me
up like a secret, the
secret I unveil;

I secret I veil.