Out of Sync

Change--

What is change?

Where should I start feeling it?

How does it come to one?

When does it begin?

 

Am I the mistress of my fate?

Am I branded

In expectation of the duty

Of slaving for dictators?

 

May I dance to the rhythm

Of my curvy femininity

To feel each elegant eruption of 

My body?

(my home?)

Or must I forgo the pleasure

And become the value

To their absurd abuse?

 

Am I allowed to even 

Choose my abuse?

 

I swing my hips

As men tell me to

When I cross

The boundaries of my blossoming,

 

I become a flower

And men get mad,

Scared of my nectar,

 

On days when I drip,

I become a hub

For these honeybees

To cruise around.

 

But they are irked 

At the same time

At my sweet jiggling thighs

With Mars,

Red Mars, 

Falling out of me

To nourish on this earth

A new revolution.

 

When I bleed,

When my mark of matrilineal courses

Once in two moons arrives,

They demote me to save their gods

From the wrath of my vocal womanhood.

 

I am borne down

By the weight of impurity,

Deserted,

For my body has rebelled

Against their idea of marital breeding.

 

I am set aside from their mansion

To the dungeons

Because its shine may wear off

If I take a walk--

A walk of shame--

With the wetness of my vagina

Weeping down to the floor.

 

But on the seventh sun

I am ordered to wash,

Rub, bathe, and cleanse myself

As I keep clean their vigorous virility.

 

I reach the sink

And let the water run--

To flow through my veins again,

As does their oppression,

 

Beneath it but,

The hose trickles a drop, a dot,

A hint to an incomplete man.

They both strew their dirt in droplets,

And I am forced

To atone their sins

All the same.

 

I cook meals

To feed them with something

More than just my vulnerabilities,

They smack their fingers

And suck the pulp of the drumsticks

As they have sucked out my voice,

 

And then, like a used contraceptive

I am thrown,

To the edge of the dining table,

To one side of the bed,

Discontented.

 

I have been starved

For food and for them,

I am not allowed

To dine or bed with strangers,

So, I sit at the table

To feed my body

But then they are enraged

Because my self-pleasure accuses

Their phallus of incompetence.

 

I become a jute sack,

Arriving at their kingdom 

With provisions enough

To fill these men's bellies.

Every bit of my nourishment

Calms their rumbling stomach,

Till they strip me to a rag.

 

Then I am thrown under the sink

Under the broken drain

That carries their sin, their ego--

To soak

Their dirt.

 

I must become one of them,

Dolled-up and decorated,

Until a revolution begins at the sink

And between my legs--

 

To overthrow them

To disown their seed from growing inside me,

To not nurture it with my blood

To not create a world for them inside my own

 

Not to let women suffer

Endlessly

At the sink.