Shoulders, calves, thighs, belly, side breasts, breasts, body, skin, bones,
why are you censoring me,
why are you censoring my femininity? How does a body offend you, how does a body invite you?
I never asked you to ring the bell, I never even placed the map in front of you to my door.
I never put a doormat with welcome inscribed.
My mother enveloped me in her warmth, while my pain pooled on the sheets.
In silence there were same questions, I became my body but it still isn’t mine.
Desire, Control, Obsess, Possess
Couldn’t control desire, hands unwrapping themselves, wrapping me against ice floors,
thinking I placed myself like a freshly cooked meal in front of you
orgasming again and again while unconscious.
Strangers on streets worry more about my skin showing, advising me on metros,
staring like I am an anomaly.
I am not giving out any tickets, there is nothing to look at, we have all got flesh and bones wrapped in skin.
Skin is not a sin.
Femininity, space, freedom, independence.
I like my rights. I have had to fight for these and they still tell me all of this doesn’t belong together, the only things that belong together is a man and his woman.
His penis and her vagina behind a dumpster, while she lays unconscious,
is the exact definition of belonging together no Oxford or Collins has ever given you.
Even though she doesn’t know your name, and now that your name haunts her, you still blame the alcohol, oh dear, alcohol, what a sin,
what a mind-changer playing games with my innocent soft young mind.
You swam right through her, and her words are still taken lightly while your scholarship is taken highly.
She has to swim in fear while you swim in the Olympics, because your father said,
“Boys will be boys.”
Why are you fighting so hard?
Femininity has taught to me fight; in home, in my bed, younger I could have said sexism is dead.
But then I had to grow up and be more than this body, than these breasts and hips, but they don’t even let me call it as it is–
this body is my home that I carry myself in,
my home is sexualised over and over again by eyes I try to unsee.
Shoulders, calves, thighs, belly, side breasts, breasts, body, skin, bones,
a mere body of bones and souls have become gilded statues embedded with eyes and nose and ears and breasts to be looked upon my men on streets, and to be commented on by men on streets, as if my body is theirs, a public property, and they have all the right to touch and comment and whisper in my ears words of pleasure,
pleasure that is synonymous for torture
Nights in the shower;
I have wanted to just unzip my skin and jump out of it into a grainy rough shirt,
or don crocodiles skin.
They tell me what they like and what is acceptable; skin of course isn’t acceptable.
You should just wear your bones, they are really in right now. Why don’t you?
We can show our nipples but you can’t because you also have this fat around yours that we have made an object of only desire, of course it’s not a body part; it’s also not acceptable for your baby to feed on it in public.
No, it’s only meant for me to fondle in rooms or wherever whenever I like to. Patriarchy stays, your freedom doesn’t, the lawyer stands up,
Donald Trump stands up,
all the Brock Turners of the world stand up,
STOP FIGHTING.
I am alone in the mountains, gazing at the view from steps in the valleys, a man feels necessary to come close into my personal space and
whisper as I walk away “black is my favourite colour” in my ear.
I was in black head to toe, trust me I wasn’t mourning my personal space.
My grandfather said don’t wear skirts and take knives, see even without a skirt you have put a knife into my freedom and skinned me apart.
Another man chased me down the street till he knew the address of my hotel and my contours of my body; another man followed me to a cafe and sat next to me and talked while I tried to excuse myself, saying the view of Himalayas isn’t good enough, what a shameful lie.
My hands shivered as the moon drew closer, and my fingers dialed a friend, and I said I got harassed today in an alien city and I am scared.
Why do they have to say these things? Why, she told me, that’s the way it is. It is acceptable to them. This is accepted.
My boss sent me a string of messages after I changed my display pictures,
he is 36 and says my pictures are “attractive” — bile rises up in my throat in his presence
and my father gets angry when I rant and he doesn’t get it when I rant;
he tells me he is just kidding around,
you shouldn’t take him too seriously.
In the name of being friendly this has become acceptable.
Shoulders, calves, thighs, belly, side breasts, breasts, body, skin, bones.
Why are you censoring me?
I am a woman, is that not a human?
Why are you censoring me, why are you negating me, why are you discriminating against me,
Why are you only sexualising me?
Love has been confused into only lust, desires that need immediate gratification,
minds that assume that they need to gratify in any which way possible.
I am woman; freedom is not a given choice,
I have had to feel what it is to yearn for something so much that my stomach hurts,
I have had to speak out and stay silent to not get myself hurt
by the hands of another man like Brock Turner,
who will win legal battles like Brock Turner,
because they have raised generations with
“boys will be boys” not respecting the other equal half which gives birth to them, enough.
This has become acceptable to them. Not to me, never to me, never will be to us.