They call you MY ******.

I have a mother; my mother

A sister; may be a daughter

Or a son.

My father, my brother, my friend, my classmate, my lover

My people.

Where do you figure?

Yet they say you are mine.

Mine.

Their impassioned pleas

Echo in courtrooms, in police stations,

On stark black letters staring out of newspapers;

Crisp saris and well-fitted suits, their accented comments

Drenched in arrogance, tumbling out of flat-screen television sets;

Smug families discussing me (and you) in bright living rooms

With unblemished walls bearing paintings of enigmatic women.

They all say

You are MY ******.

I can see you.

I can see you glowing with pride.
Feel the shroud of admiring glances

Cocooning you wherever you go.

For every sigh of cuss, there are a hundred

Congratulatory nods.

They giggle

As you hold my mangled soul

Up above your head,

Like the tattered flag of an enemy country.

Why, you have silenced another of those

Who dared to rear her sad, ugly head.

Or a happy, pretty one.

What difference does it make?

You never saw

My eyes

Eyes screaming out loud, and going dry

Wide open, yet blind.

You didn’t feel

Tired, shapeless lumps of my being watching us

As my body stopped being mine,

But an amalgam of *******, ******, and a

Deep long scar across eternity.  

While I no longer have a name,

You possess one more: ‘My ******.’

Oh yes, I invited it upon myself

I have chosen it,

I have chosen YOU.

It was predestined. A given.

Since the time I was born.

So you might as well be mine.

My ******!