Minor Character

Not your sidekick,
Not your wannabe Queen-be,
Not your Asian sensation,
Math marvelous,
sake-swindling
mistress.

Not yours.
Not anyone's unless I claim to be.

I am the result of
an infinite possiblity
with a finite heart,
with a fine heart,
with a finned heart...
waiting to wade in water:
an ocean heart.

I am open and closed book
anomaly.
You don't have to understand.
And you don't get to know my pages
Unless I want you to know my story.
And no, you don't get to today.

I am a three-vowel sound kind of woman ---
difficult to say who she is and who she wants to be
but worthy all the same.
I have a three-tongued soul
waiting to be unleashed
in tones and trills and accent marks.

I come to you with open hands
that will easily turn into fists
if provoked,
if stoked,
if prodded and poked.

I'm not a hoax.
Not a pretend-to-be-peddler of dreams,
I am a dream.
I am the dreamer
Breaking from the nightmare of a supposed reality.

You define reality no longer, colonizer.
You once hypnotized my self away,
an already threadbare affair,
so no longer.
No longer will you take jagged claws
to flesh and bone and sinew.

Though you criticize with scythe-like jaws
No more shall you torment,
No more shall you torture.
No more shall I retort.

My voice lives on,
Not in shouting
But in singing.

I sing of where Butterflies don't put metal to marrow,
I sing of where eyes are seen as the gatekeepers of the mind
                         and passerbys do not complain how narrow the path is,
                                                 but admire the angles and journey.
I sing of all the times I was forced into silence
from all the grow up, girl's  to "you look just like her" to mangled Mandarin syllables,
I sing of you, enemy.
I sing from the rafters all the times you shoved a hand over my mouth.

I sing my story in all its drafts and revisions.
I sing until my lungs run dry and gasp for air
Because the story...
the story must be told
only the way I tell it...

Not you.
Never you.