For Orlando

If I say “I support homosexuality and gender fluidity”
Or “The world is not a binary arrangement of sexes”
Or even “I believe that love transcends our pathetic ties and boundaries”
It won’t lessen the pain that you have caused.

For every time you buy Her Pink and Him Blue, you propagate a figment of your paranoia
Every time you snigger at the ‘sensitive’ man and call him “faggot” and “homo”; multiple dominoes topple in the distance
Every time you spray paint Dyke on that girl’s locker, several other girls add a padlock more to their closet doors.

Every time you attack my “colourful” and “rainbowed” brothers and sisters, I feel attacked myself as a human
If this isn’t your form of cannibalism, then what is?
Don’t you dare give me your Biblical jargon and your holy discourse
That the Lord made us in a perfect cast, and any deviation is a horrific sin.

You who smear coal on their faces, and rip their clothes apart
You who rape them as an antidote to their perverseness
You who cat-call them at every street corner
You who bludgeon them mentally,
You with the bloodied hands and the besmirched hearts.

You who make my sky a little blacker everytime I look up
You who make my blood cold, and my evenings colder
You who stop us from expressing our solidarity, our support for a cause

My mother who laughs ever-so-softly everytime a homosexual character lights up the celluloid
(I block my ears to drown out that hint of condescension)
My best friend whose “That’s so gay!” remark is now a running joke,
Eliciting shoulder pats and appreciative smiles
(I don’t react. I don’t know how to)
My colleague who can’t help but declare emphatically,
That women with short hair are 100% “into women”
(I would be lying if I say my hairdresser doesn’t receive strict orders to maintain an “appropriate” length)

I feel attacked as a human,
But I sit here,
Stewing in hypocrisy.
No lesser a criminal than you,
You with this homophobia;
And I with this dormancy.

Dante said “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis”
But if this world that I live in isn’t Inferno,
Then what is?

– A