24 Poem by Mostafa Didar

Brewed in socially engineered incubators,
The technical marvels,
the fittest species
Gifted with consciousness
Alpha Alpha Alpha!

The pissings and the hissings,
The tang of broken bones
and disappointment
in your tea-cup perfectly
placed beside
two unevenly poached eggs.

The morning newspapers
containing glory of all things
bought, sold and traded
for a life,
for a laugh,
for someone losing their self-regard
to afford child support or life.

The noise that keeps you awake
let it be seashores
or the sound of bullets
rounding off at
seventeen hundred miles per hour
and your snore.

The times you're alone
when your mirrors stop answering
to the smiles for everyone
you've been drawing lately.

But the mirrors refuse to answer
because maybe
you've been doing it all wrong.
And you turn off the light to realize
how dark and lonely it is.

Because you're not afraid to die,
You're afraid to live.

And you know when I look at you,
I see right through you,
For all of your victories,
And all of your sins.
For the ninety-secondth time
you've been thinking of killing yourself,
because you were too afraid of your sexuality,
because you've felt insecure in your skin,
and your inability to finish
the sentence with a broken accent
when you wanted to talk about Gods
and the worms in your gut.

Can't you see,
If I can see,
If all you have
are your Sundays or Fridays,
why do you think of the other six
so differently?

Why can't you just be?
Count how many airplanes
take off in a minute,
and see,
how the Sun sets
differently
in July.
And say your goodbyes to
Twenty-Three.