TAINT
I exile myself from myself. and YOU——-Don’t see yourself as…….Tainted. If you do….you hide it and make me tainted and I see you Sad. And that makes you see me angry, insane. Impossible.
When I do, I’m home. Home is exile. Exile because there’s no way what you call ‘home’ can be mine.
And as if home doesn’t change, morph, move into something — always unrecognizable. It’s too late for recognition. But I will show you something and you will recognize it for what you think and feel and hear and taste. My body is colonized by your gaze.
We’re people-of-color. That’s an identity that’s tainted. But without it I completely become white and Japanese and black. Colonized by those rules of walk, talk, understanding, dance.
When I choose my ‘own’ way, I know it’s not my own. It’s been handed down. If so, who gives a shit?
It doesn’t matter in this so-called ‘post-social’ world of ours….alienations and displacements where people who have had communities continued in another land, another space/time and call it ‘home’ will ————look down——-down——on me and those like me. And we can pretend to be brothers and sisters because we share. And some who don’t look down on me, think we are equals. No time/space, no legacy, no sekihan, cho-cho, miso shiru, barbecued ribs, konketsuji, nigger, left unconscious dead. I’m not allowed. So in that time where you cannot bear my pain and it is exiled into me, we SHARE ———the colonized mind. But there are those who do share. There’s no need for the pain, but there’s a need for allowing and alliance.
Can we ‘Be’——with our differences? The thousand bombs and body-part explosions, mushroom clouds and slavery whips, and imprisonments of my ancestors and the occupation of my body in heterosexual mindscapes and border-guard territories———will NOT make you superior to me. Because you don’t remember. Forever you may enslave yourself but I remain TAINTED in your result, your gun. Your attitude-pistol that props you up WITH it. Instead of takuan, I eat hamburgers in that place. But I eat takuan uh huh. Hungry.
Forever blackened in your multicultural superiority that pretends equality. Forever not right. Forever imprisoned. No matter how many songs I sing to you, no matter how many silences and gentle hands, I’m only a big penis, a tawny muscle movement, a …a…..a….a. some ‘THING’ that is compared to your utopia. Utopia……the unconscious colonial organ.
‘Thing’ yourself with your colonized mind, until you crave, then so so tired tired you start to see me. Perhaps someday….we may actually touch beyond eyes here. Right here, and between your complete and beautiful to my complete and beautiful. Always it is part, incomplete, moving and dancing in time. complete is incomplete always and beautiful, but justice moans. Then we understand that we are scarred.
Scarred and twisted in your so-called will to perfection. That is perverted….tainted. Just ‘being’ I am tainted because YOU are tainted. Funny thing is…. there doesn’t need to be this———TAINT. But what?
Taint me and I you. Let’s walk y’all.
AI NO KO 