Spirit cage, our personal Guantanamo
The air between the bars keeps us in.
The ones we love accost us with their needs,
hold the cage keys,
gently swinging,
tinkle,
at their belts.
We chain ourselves with duty.
We endure for those we love,
wear orange and keep the head down low,
appearing to accept what history does.
Duty of care,
as if we choose
when this
just
IS.
We turn our hearts to loving
others
to be happy,
to survive,
believing selfishness
to be
the stabber
sin:
the sinister, sulky reverse
of succour,
our personal survival
last..
lost,
welded in
oblivion.
But,
I find,
I am not you,
I find we are not
we.
I find
that not
being able to do the things
I need to do for me,
not being able to love and be loved by the ones
I need,
myself and my twin in love,
and loving my family who I love
but who are not
you,
and who are not
me....
I find sitting cross-legged inside the cage
in the blazing heat and the midnight pinning, pining pen
ends
the will
to live,
the reverse of captive cannibal courage:
coeur.
Is this tawdry self-pity?
This is nothing at all reflexive or reflective
socially definable
economically advisable,
sensible or foolish,
bourgeois or trailer trash,
this is neither bright nor dim
this is nothing at all to do with
the light,
I would say.
.....
Is this trivial?
the dark blood weir,
sluice-gate
foundering
fate,
beyond government
structuring, morality,
not the pristine public snare
at all,
the personal Guantanamo?
Perhaps.
This is
just
the ability to breathe and have a heartbeat
keeping me
alive.
It is, I find,
impossible to carry on for long
when one is,
when the heart is,
grid-locked into
stop.
Even the inconsiderate flesh
rejects,
the body wretch,
even the solitary spirit cage
ejects
such a soul
as it tries to cling
with hands
of blood and water
to the bars
that let it
go.
Spirit cage, our personal Guantanamo was first published in Some Other Damn Rainbow -Unsanctioned Writing of the Middle East, ed. Hind Shoufani (Beirut) 2012