Immigrant

Kay Hassan

TO MY UN-ROGUE FELLOW
(A Chant for the Exiled, Beyond the Edge of Time)

Let us go, then—you and I—
when the sky is not a sky but a wound peels back,
a god’s forgotten suture,
stretched taut above the city that was never ours.

You—un-rogue, half-born of vanished maps,
your life not lived but counted in stolen breaths,
in rooms where the walls speak in erased languages,
where the dust is not dust but the powdered bones
of every shrine you ever failed to burn.

There is no flame here.
Only the ghost-taste of a tongue you cut out yourself,
only the father’s name rotting in your throat
like a coin placed there by the dead.

You gnaw the bones of second birth—
but they are not bones, they are the fossilized cries
of the hollow men, the fragments of a cult
you dare not pass down,
not even if your blood screams
with the hexameters of blind Homer,
the last command of Caesar’s ghost,
the steppe-wind’s hunger,
the prophets’ strangled vowels,
the whimper of Judah
drowning in its own gold.

You are the riddle.
Not the sphinx’s—but the answer no one wanted.
A wanderer in a city that erases itself as you walk,
your pride a funeral shroud stitched from old flags,
your confidence a mirror that shows only the wall behind you.

Death grins through you.
You are not a man but the pause between two heartbeats,
the white space in the letter of condemnation,
the joke the executioner tells the axe
before the blade falls.

Now.
School the caged beast—your rage, your unwritten epic—
not in words but in the silence between gunshots.
Rise—not toward any heaven that would have you,
but past the stars’ deaf witness,
past memory’s black hemorrhage,
past the blight that flowers in your name.

Un-rogue- fellow,
Un-rogue- fellow,
Stop somewhere
And show your tears
You are  not a  thriller-
You are a  grotesque mask

No matter how you Mourn  Your  Luck,
School  thy raging soul - and for good,
Lift  up  yourself ,  higher than ever,
Then  look up unto  topmost- eyes,
Not At Your Past ,Your  Nethermost Region.:
Your ancient arsenal of MALICE.

Do not look to the grave’s embrace—
look to the light that comes before dawn,
the light that is not light but the tearing of the veil,
where malice unravels into wind,
where time is a scroll burned to ash,
where you—no longer rogue, no longer ghost—
stand, for one impossible instant,
not shining, not redeemed,
but finally, flawlessly—
stay empty.

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