Recalling the Orlando massacre of Sunday 12 June 2016 in verse
 
When the most beautiful children in the world are brutally murdered inside the walls of their sanctuary
Youth and elders that shape a vulnerable community that enlivens and enriches our capacity for love and pleasure as humans
A community whose sheer existence destabilises the toxic and carceral gender norms that constrain personhood to dead pawns of capital and private property
A community that stands moment by moment a resilient testament to each individual soul’s heartbreaking confrontation with difference
Denigration by and exclusion from reigning political and cultural structures
Such that they are reduced to lives that do not matter, on account of their affirmation of life out of bounds
Such that police and SWAT teams let three fatal hours pass while the hate-formed and hate-filled interloper with an assault rifle continues to murder the suffering crowd inside of their sacred space of kinship and celebration
 
There is seemingly no sense or beauty enough in the world to make this scene cohere
To give us solace for this brutalising space of sanctioned terror
Cast in and out of relief in the darkness of selective media blackout and whitewashing of the early hours of a Sunday morning
Time in no time
The motion of history asserts itself
The social death that we daily battle and feel is materialised over and over in blood on the dance floor
This space of your inaction in the face of the murder of your unacknowledged kin and the forebears of your future peace and happiness
The murder of those who don’t yet matter to you in the way that the dead pawns of capital which define your confused existence matter to you
Cling to what you know even if it is killing the most beautiful children in the world before your eyes
Protect and serve
An abstract threat to the status quo of your existence is being gunned down in front of you and a part of you is relieved
Make it go away, this bad dream of difference
 
The ugliness of the world around you made you into a monster
You coveted guns and violence and thrilled at an opportunity to enact the violence you have felt against your queer brown body all of your life; to make an explosion so big and loud that people would have to pay attention; to kill as many other queer brown bodies as possible
Because that is what the culture around you taught you
To blame your actions on Islam because that narrative is so sensational and compelling right now
 
Without any knowledge of the beauty and limitless light and beauty of Allah and the Silsillah of care that cannot be broken
Sending off our youth into the arms of the Beloved all of them in an embrace that took so much light and heat that the temperature in my city dropped by 20 degrees and clouded over the next three days
So strong the pull that a baby bird I turned to rescue out of the street was in such a hurry to join them that it was run over by an unseeing car before I could reach it
 
Life extinguished to dead matter on pavement
The movement of history
The rush to heaven
The blood on my sheets
The sweat on my sheets
The tears on my face
The torpor of the days that follow such a rupture in the fabric of life
I won’t eat, I won’t wear make up
I will eat
Everything in sight
I won’t eat
I will forget why I am here
I will forget my wallet
My keys
My sunglasses
I will forget my recovery from past episodes of depression
Crave cigarettes
Crave the feeling of a blade scratching and cutting through the tender skin on the inside of my forearms
Is it better to join the dead ones
Or is it my place to sit here and write through the pain and
Try to help those of us left behind to remember love
 
The hearts breaking around the world as we cannot make sense
I cling to the faith that is blamed for the killer’s madness and for the deaths of my queer brothers and sisters
The light filled way of seeing the world that I learned from mystical Islam is the only way to make sense of this pain
They say Allah does not give you a burden too heavy for you to bear but sometimes it is so hard to really believe this
In an email on Friday, I learn that my Sheykha has assigned a name of our gunned-down kin to each member of my community in the Tribeca mosque to hold in prayer for the remainder of the month of Ramadan
The fact that a week later I’m crying every day. Especially when one of my Muslim sisters and brothers reaches out to me in love for me as a queer woman
As I try to remember this month of sacred remembrance is a beautiful time to join the spirit world if you must join the spirit world before we thought it was your time

Image from: http://goo.gl/KsZ6ZP