From Exile (1)

Each day is another lifetime
In purgatory.
Immediately as I step out,
I am drowned in a sea of eyes,
Hands seize me,
Breaths scorch me.

Somehow I swim across,
Somehow, I’ve learnt to.

On the other shore,
I am shorn of my identity.
I stand half naked.
They ask me:
‘You eat human flesh, don’t you?’
Nowadays I do not protest
Quietly, I pay the price of being
What they are not.

As I swim back across
Fighting monsters, gasping for breath
I miss life.
I search for an anodyne,
Find oblivion.

But even as I do, I remember,
Tomorrow is yet another lifetime
In purgatory.

The exile begins to seem pointless.