Reflections on an experiment in self love

1.  my mixed blood waters down my colour but not the weeping of our people when my head turns to face the land no longer ours – which feels the same as when he looks at me through blurry eyes
2. those boys I loved, with obsidian hair, could not enter my house because my mother couldn’t see the pieces of herself my father loved to deny
3. the deeper I look into my dancing DNA, the more closely I feel to language I can only feel
4. sometimes I wish my skin did not give me the privilege I could not recognise.  It seemed to be disguised as hubris.
5. there are times when I feel sick to know I am part of the colonial problem
6. at those times I smudge and my Ancestors hold me to their drumming hearts
7. “queer definition: knowing your body is both too much and not enough for this world.”
8. I can’t hold myself now – my arms are not long enough anymore
9. at the end of it all, this flesh is dust…my spirit lives in love forever.

(c) r. l. elke

In honour of Billy Ray Belcourt’s “Love and other Experiments” in This Wound is a World