Wreath of Thorns
I have turned that claymore, prompting it to face me. Like a kneeling prayer, like a grieving Judas. In my twenty-one years of survival, I have never seen an Israeli before. And to that, I pray you do not ask me if I am afraid of war.
I detest becoming history itself, for I have seen it rewritten, falsified, translated, and forsaken. History is treated like it is scraped the way the concrete off of an enervated mansion would. History bears no autonomy, unlike my tether jewelry. And I do not wish to travel back in portals or grovel at its feet.
I am the consciousness that haunts every maimed phalanx of ants, and every century-old lingering whisper as the knight betrays its chessboard. Consciousness cannot be shaken, not even by an autumnal compass. Then, there is this humanly collective need to gather the robed memories and set them free. I am the consciousness that prohibits their passage to freedom.
I do not write to be perused, and I do not speak to be butchered like the ribs at the abattoir. God has sent an intricate scripture that is yet to be decrypted, and to his hail abides the glory.
Whatever they have placed on top of me, my long strands have furnished the grass that sanctions the thorns. I wish to speak in my mother tongue when they plead and seek directions from me, and I will. No colonizer deserves to be compensated, and I wish to be that very erasure.
I am not a doctrinaire, I am not a prophet of faith. I am the child of a camp that has seen it all go to waste. And as even a prophet like David has once erred, and then repented before the two angels, then I will permit this mattress to slip away for a moment.
I suppose I must unveil myself as a means to properly destruct the empire circulating me. The rationale in me has almost cannibalized me, and I may have softened parts of my flesh in aid. I try to paint the scenes on the canvas, and fashion a new color.
Here comes my craft of bordering the grander scheme of this reality, and this museum must be both fatigued and enthralled. Every painting has sacrificed its religious imagery, and the angels are Samaelean and one-winged. I feel my heart surrendering to the cold frosting of the world, but my heart could be colder. I assure myself because I have not been to the coldest places of the continents, I have never witnessed what lies beyond that horizon.
Why is it that I seem to remember this all, chiseling a hole into my memory, when my hands are engaging in the most mundane of plays? I have failed the claims of the aforementioned; my heart could not have been colder. It is so because I have not been to the coldest places of the continents.
It seems as if everything I could have been, everything any Palestinian could have been, is already stolen away from us. I am a product, does one understand? I am a political birth and a political existence.
I grasp myself better when I write so intricately because I am a sum of complex equations. I refuse to be divided or calculated. The world is a moving, cruel machine, but I am the plier.
I knew a woman, Palestinian, who once believed that she could live side by side with the enemy because her mind just wanted to skip sailing this distant ship of bloodshed.
She had not yet seen a neighboring Israeli.
Her time had come, and she traveled to meet with people for a project, and one of the members turned out to be an ancient enemy.
She found herself crossing over her chalice of détente, and her lips drew a leaking stream of division. Her sight could not bear the monster walking the chamber her footsteps were also sharing. Often times, we turn against our psyche, and unknowingly, we have always had it. It was just locked in captivity.
The difference between the Israeli society and mine is that theirs is built on the pernicious ages of falsehood, whilst I come from a bloodline of adult children with punctilious hands. Our tides are judges of the snowmen we keep on structuring, blind to the consistent status of disintegrating dawn.
This consciousness assembles itself like a Palestinian fighter waiting to storm their now strangely looking balcony, and I find my cells adhering to the subliminal. The dominoes dive like a lake’s ripples and their effects desire me.
And this mirror that leaves its reflection of me confers my horns with redressed thorns, and this silvered glass derides my prophecy, overlooking that it’s scarcely a metal speaking using its inherent property.
Do not question my actions, or my rabid reactions, when I am faced with an M16 rifle, or met with the footsteps of an unworthy voyager. How would I feel when the enemy stands before me, with their lavish lives and abducted property?
I am not afraid of war; I fear losing my ataraxy when I intimately meet the creatures who have taken everything away from me.
Yet, this wreath is now a relic of its enemy’s apostasy. When the ink is swept away like the storm a couple winters ago, my index is the needle and the suction, and the thorns the body’s circulatory.
But to where do we descend when the vexillum is a lie? For a score of centuries, the Roman Empire persisted, then succumbed to its own and external tempest.
