ŞEKER OĞLAN*

With your community focused eyes
and the mercy you hoped for by staring at the sky,
folding, coping, hanging there to yourselves
should you be cowardly to whomever. 

I am looking for the courage of a lover
to kiss me in front of statesmen
while preferring the painful criticisms
to a silent trauma.

Morals and orders
inherited from father to son,
kissing the lips of these fat-ass politics
with ease.

I am ‘NOT TV’.
Do not mess with my settings.
I am sick of your turning my volume down
or turning me on and off
whenever the fuck you like.


I am not a TV,
yet guilty of accepting the invitations 
to your panic-attack-breakfasts 
in your emergency world.
I am not a project.

Your only dilemma is that 
I dream of Joseph.
Looking at me worried that
I am as OUT as a banner,
with ‘everthing-is-alright’ make-up
on your faces.

Funny,that I am busy 
with learning my favorite song by heart,
with kissing the feet of my lover,
with applying some cream to the implications 
that you shitted on my image
in my darkly lighted room.

Funnier,that I am reading
My Sweet Orange Tree** and The Soft Machine*** 
and stomping the-proper-men-march with my feet,
throwing my-name-included in rumors with your reputations.

What is the use of everything being so similar?
Getting ready for the funeral of my ex-lover.

Funniest,that I got harrassed by the neighbor
whom you all thought seemed so decent.

Asking my mom to dance with me.
Reading poetry to deal with it. 
Making fun of all little knick-knacks
you call manly.

Besides,
I know
that you don’t know
that I am not the stone 
that you picked from your rice.
But the love instead.

What about you, by the way?



*   Candy Boy in Turkish
** A book by José Mauro de Vasconcelos
***A book by William S. Burroughs

Re-imagined by Sa Bahattin and the magical Branka J.