I – am not a poet
Because poets have purpose
And I am often confused
And eaten by self-doubt
I – am not a poet
Because poets have a way with words
And my words are often lost on their way
And when they finally reach me
They are struck by a “writer’s block”
I – am not a poet
Because poems are often glorified
Tumblr-fied
Tweet-worthy
And my pieces are just provocative
semi-erotic
and often painful
I – am not a poet
Because I will never get published
I never follow the “ten rules to make you a better writer”
I never accept constructive criticism when it comes to self-expression
My poetic pieces are pieces of me
How dare anyone say they can be written “better”?!
I – am not a poet
Because I am all flaws I fail to own up to
And I always find other poems a tough act to follow
plus, the flow of my pieces is often broken
and the only thing keeping my lines together
Is grammatical mistakes
misplaced in random sentences
But I still write
I write for the African minds
The Arabized
The colonized
The ones who realized
That post-structuralism is irrelevant without our past
That racism still thrives post-independence
And that orientalism has been internalized, over the generations
We now like it when we get called “Exotic East Africans”
I write to fight the fake religious fanatics
And to shame the sham elections
We still want bread, freedom, and social justice
We also want stable electricity and cheaper gas, for a change
I write for the hijabi gone atheist
I write for the convert who found the light
I write for the non-hijabi Islamist
Slandered for not having a piece of cloth on her head
I write for the girls brainwashed to believe
that they are nothing but uteruses for future jehadies
and the girls beaten to believe
that domestic abuse is love and protection
I write for boys
Forced to fake machoism
Feminism is on your side when it isn’t misunderstood for misandry
I write for the men
Forgotten in medical records
The ones you never hear about
The ones raped and abused
But had to “man up” about it
Fold their pain and keep it in their back pockets
I write for the activists
Who were recognized after their death
But lived for years on the edge, with the rest of the forgotten
Martyrdom reduce their legacy to statues and street names
I write
To stretch my heart across pages
Of old memories and regrets
I write
To forgive and to forget
Those who never meant anything to me
Those who didn’t amount to a single line in my poetry
But still keep finding their way to me in late night lonesome
I write
To make a future home for my poems
In dusty shelves and abandoned drawers
I write
To blend in with the background
…
to be forgotten
