I was born in terrorism.
I grew up in earthquakes, tsunamis and rebels:
in shouting blond girls with red eyes and pixel
smiles.

I was born in blurred faces and mute
voices pulling at my
eyes until I dripped the clotted
tears of a thousand soldiers, or refugees,
or children.

I was atomized, crunched
into small seeds and scattered
across a desert field.
Someday a flower would grow there,
budded from the bones
of my being and  
flowered into a fiery,
empty marigold-- dripping
gold and embers across a thirsty desert,
where the shout
of the civilians was distant
enough to ignore.

I was sodomized,
conceived in the roar--
of the rumbling wave- crashing over-
pulsing through her thrashing cave.

I watched my flower whither
and blister with the deliberate count
down and the glare of the
floodlights-- dowsed in water and soil--
or some semblance of the two.  

I was born in the blood
of my mother and died in the
womb of the world.