You don’t get scars when they cut out your tongue;
It just makes it harder to breathe for a minute
Or two.

It was longer,
the first time they told you to quiet down,
When your thoughts didn’t matter because they weren’t
Sugar sweet and
syrup to swallow,
You felt it then,

The marrow scraping knowledge that this was what it meant
to be a woman,
And you were fully grown
before your 14th birthday,
In a classroom,
because you were angry.

Ignorant words had slashed your heart and you were
angry,
but you were a volcano under water,
Ready to meet the tide
and create new ground with your voice.
Girls don’t get to be angry unless there’s blood
and they tell you as much.

It is the first time your mind
Had been so thoroughly dismissed, the first time they told you
that you needed permission to be,
like you were nothing
but a slave
to a biological side-effect,
That gave them the right to take your tongue.

Laugh at your knowledge,
Taunt your vision,
Disparage your ambition,
Patronize your every decision,
You are a woman now and your tongue has one purpose
that the choking
Helps.

You have felt the cold sting of words made of steel,
and the warm slap of vanilla entitlement,
from strangers and friends alike.
The acid burn of the slow reveal
and the Atlantic shock of instant surgery,
They have cut out your tongue all your life.

But

It grows back.
You pick up the pieces of yourself that the world
is determined to dissolve, and you glue them back on,
with grit, and fire, and blood.
It is hard to breathe, for a minute, or two, but you don’t need permission to rage and question and cry out.

They did not ask for permission to take your tongue, your voice, you,
But they will receive what they did not ask for, newly formed and forge fresh,
White hot as you sear your words into their bones.
You are a woman.

And you have learned that
You don’t get scars when they cut out your tongue;

They do.

All's quiet on the western front but in the East
the pyre's still burning,
On streets of dust and rubble and blood
Where little hands are as likely found
In pockets
as on the pavement
in brutal bursts of red or rust.

Shells of buildings crumple into the skyline;
Gravestones lamenting the death of a nation,
Of a boy not yet old enough
to run,
Of a girl left at home
when the walls came down,
A parody of a crippled city still standing.

There is wailing;
Of sirens and prayer and grief,
As white helmets pull white cloth parcels from concrete tombs,
And another line is lost,
Lists of forgotten names becoming sand,
Trickling back to the earth in streams and storms at golden gates.

Watch this history of the future unfold,
Safely from a screen, safer still in that certainty,
There may be something yet
Left for the generations that come
After,
The victors' history in the victor's hand,
As eons of war are written away, the lives lost,
buried,
6 ft deep.

When you're ready,
and not a moment before
Set your bones down in the
Water of my love
And Drown in the succour
Flowing there
Til your lungs are heavy
With the weight of a heart
And the currents that jolt through
your skin
Are a reminder of the concert it beat
for you

There, we will let the dead things go,
To be washed away by the tide
of our two streams colliding
In a flurry of consciousness and
ecstasy;
Like the moment of revelation
Like a thousand deaths
and Rebirths

And we will breathe
At last,
with sopping lungs and dripping bones,
Raw and aching and utterly
Filled to the brim with each other,
Overflowing with electricity and
thunder
But
Only when you are ready
To shed the armour of your skin
And drown.