I’m not Christ, but I know that the price of giving brings nausea
Author: D’Bara Arruda

​

Dearest reader of egoistic sensitivity:
Here is a visceral poem, written as a
muffled scream —
not of empty rage, but of weary clarity.
And if by the end you picture stones
being thrown at you,
then may you be the first to reflect:
Perhaps your soul is sick.

​

Today I’m uninspired,
and reason churns my stomach.
I no longer have a sieve to cover the sun,
with my malnourished gaze
from watching people and their truths too closely.
I can’t turn a blind eye.
Each one, conformist, yawns their laments
and cries out unilaterally for rights that belong to all.

​

Time already slips through my fingers
on days I must deliver to eardrums
the echo of others’ burdens.
Deafening, the weight of each soul
consumed by the convenience of victimhood.
Everyone wants,
but giving hurts the core of what is asked of them.
My benevolence is easy prey
in the sea of “woes” that surrounds my face.

​

Dear Christ,
is it true they repaid your divine batch
with the cross nailed by ingratitude?
Didn’t they even consider that,
when wine ran out at the feast,
you turned water into it?

​

Yes... people bend their knees
and amorally lie in their pitiful prayers.
Wickedness inflates faith.
Imagine, friend:
if they weren’t reciprocal with you,
naïve of me to think they would be with me.

​

Distorted friendships, demands for rights
with no will for duties,
and selfishness masked as need
— its stench already suffocates me.
Yet still, it troubles me to be harsh,
even though, for me,
the most despicable feeling one can hold for another
is pity.

​

Weariness of the just. Pain without self-pity. Reflection without sermon.
Wounded love, but not defeated.
“Yes, I keep loving,
but I can no longer carry anyone’s world alone.”

​

The difference between compassion and emotional servitude:
To love doesn’t mean being a doormat.
The courage to say “no.”
The just don’t deny their love,
but they refuse to be consumed by it.

​

I don’t write poems;
I merely transmute the hypocrisy of the days around me.
In this world constipated with lies,
spitting truths through clenched teeth… is my labour.

​

“I don’t want to be loved; hate me, if you can and wish.
I even understand that perhaps my words
are the thorn in your throat,
whose velvet crimson bud bursts into your mouth
like kind words.”