Time, is the only shackle we can never free ourselves from.
We are prisoners on a shutter island not wanting to go home anymore, or maybe not knowing what home is.
But still I am in love with the way that the wind at night-time runs it’s thick tongue along whatever sweat this skin has earned itself.
I am in love with the way the glistening moon finds it’s light in the darkness of the night.
Or how the cry of the loon is the last thing a body hears when it is floating on the surface of the sea.
And you do not have to apologise for the things that led you to learn the weight of time, my people.
That the sins you committed were merely rose petals perfectly aligned leading you to this moment.
What I’m saying is that sometimes it’s not a sin to live in the past, when the present does not wish you living.
What I’m saying is, you don’t have to die to be free.
You don’t have to, find home, to be home.
What I’m saying is that home is wherever your name is spoken with ease.
Without declaring your religion..
I’m saying that your breath is religion.
Your land is religion.
I press my forehead to whatever holy land I stand on and kiss the earth.
And a scent of gratitude surrounds me, reminding me that our forefathers did not care that the kaaba once had stone Gods to be worshiped.
The kaaba was holy and sacred, because it was holy and sacred to them.
We must remember that the sky is the same to all of us.
That the stars whisper calm to all of our grieving hearts.
And time, the cold-hearted death-eater will not lend us any privilege of being Muslim, or Christian, or Jew.
My people, you have learned the worth of time, relish all that you have left of it.
Come morning, the house will smell like whoever the night took, howling into it’s jaws.
Our shirts slob with the blood pouring out of our eyes, smelling like the last moment we spent with our lost love.
Some I love, dance to the upbeat songs of life.
Some I love, dance to the sad slow songs of death.
The streets speak of the time I was once boy, so I name the streets mine.
The walls speak of the times I mourned over a lost love, so I call the love mine.
I play a song on a jukebox and this is how I was taught to pull skin over a broken heart.
I am playing a song loud in a graveyard of buried memories and watching the dirt dance.
Praise now.
Praise that which will not take us from each other.
Praise the dreams that do not make me pull my friends out of the water.
Praise the father’s that will watch their sons turn into fathers.
Praise the glorious melting of the horizon, and the promise of another to arrive in it’s place.
Praise the untethered sun, how it paints the sky red, praise the red of the sky as no blood of ours.
Praise time that reminds us that another living day has passed.
And where I come from, we do not know time as a prison, we know time as a mansion, a fortress, every room offering a new moment.
And this is how I imagine love.
Somewhere; it is always spring.
A flower slowly crawls from the earth eager to explode from your clinched fist.
Somewhere; a brown girl wearing a white dress makes me wait on the aisle.
Somewhere; there is me and her. And that whispering sticky sweet nothing between us is called love.
Somewhere; I will miss her on the day she doesn’t come back.
But until then, I will lay with you in your grave and we will count our moments marked as stars in the nightsky.
I will lay with you and the thunderous chuckles of God’s laughter will no longer shake our hearts.
I will lay with you and count the white shapes crawling across the endless blue, the clouds, floating in the open sky. Free.
And in the meantime, I will sit in my own overgrown garden of grief until the love I recognize fills this world.
And when it does, I will come to find all of you.
After the world has turned into a holy home.
After the word religion is replaced with human.
After the ticking clocks do not demand worshipping.
I will dig my hands in the dirt, grasping your bony fingers and pull you out of your buried selves.
I will ask you to unfold eachothers names in your mouths with ease.
And I wish to be turned boy again, for the streets to speak my shenanagons.
I wish to not seek for a heaven that is a reward to my death.
I wish to worship God, not time.
I wish for this holy land to echo to the sound of music, our lost loves gather to the sound of their favorite song and our dead and undead souls reunited under gods joyous laughter rumbling in the sky, playing the song of heaven.
And that is freedom.
When I swallow air without consent, without recourse.
Without the thought of one day losing it forever.
