why 176 cms? 60 kgs? — fucks to give?
my anatomy//structure is a wilderness, drinking
through the air, one part mulch, the other
a hybrid of gas-dreams.
why rate my brown-bread-skin through
its number of moles and grafts of love?
why try to measure the length&girth of my life through
an arbitrary number of years?
my freedom isn’t your sugar & flour ration
that you can scale and take away per your
desired capacity for consumption?
how do you measure the taste of my ilk,
my sun-settled eyes, the fight of my cauterized
heart?
how do you see and experience my queer body, in-
tact, (w)hole, sweet&sour&salty like the rim
of your empty shot glass?
why do i succumb to the standards set in my core
by the (ir)regularity of your burnished soul?
i shred figures and hopes, letting the well-paced,
untold story of its desire to take its toll, leaving me
to rot, with a rumbling disdain for this mirror of
your eyes, that cannot tell or realize
the plurality of my roles.
.
© Anmol Arora
Day 29
(Inter)National Poetry Month
Edit: (Previous title, the value of existence) Linking it up with The Tuesday Platform at WRT (June 4, 2019), where I am hosting this week and I have shared a poem by Kamala Das for inspiration and acknowledgment.
HA's Place 