Superiority,
Something you subconsciously enable to be furthered within my society,
Without understanding the ill-effects of your existence,
The trauma of your association,
The preservation,
Reservation,
Classification,
And lynched creation you force upon peoples,
Who struggle to shake you off.
What you are able to do,
Is create classes,
Mobilize masses: who react unknowingly,
Respond provokingly,
With condescension in every word,
Every breath,
Every beating.
You entrap,
You enslave, and you,
You limit potential: an insult higher,
More denigrating, disgusting,
Blasphemous,
Than the expletives that
Dominate every 13-year-old’s narrative.
I struggle to shake you off daily,
People believe you come from the field,
The road,
Swirling; creating a storm,
Clinging onto my skin,
Holding onto my soul,
In plain view of the world.
They’re wrong.
You are venom,
Slow poison that,
I pick up every time I walk around alone,
Every time I hold a book up at that person’s face,
Or build a wall across the border that is my personal space.
You are,
That nagging reminder that society has a
Perception of who I am
What I can be:
A thought that profoundly scares me.
And I fail to understand,
How when I stand on the shore of the sea,
At the crossroads between waves and the sand,
Water is able to erase your existence so easily:
When I’m struggling to wash you off daily.
Tejas Rao 