starry night / sunflowers on arrakis
By kevin martens wong zhi qiang
originally published wednesday, 28 june 2023
on tigri sa chang
Koitadu | Content warning
Please first read about my writing in the Skribadorang or Writing section on the Igleza page here before reading the piece below so you have advance warning about the rather spicy things that I often like to write about, and why I choose to write about them, especially in terms of subverting unhealthy stereotypes about gay people, Kristang people, Creole people, Indigenous people, masculinity, neurodivergence, the body, healthy forms of attraction and sexuality, and using my writing to process the severe individual, collective and inter-generational trauma and abuse I have faced across my life.
Something rejects
itself, as the temperatures climb,
and eyes begin to burn. I cry
in gleaming trails of dust,
withering away. Love
conquers nearly
nothing, when you think about
what keeps coming true,
every day.
Maybe if I wore a stillsuit.
Maybe if I knelt to pray
to Shai'Hulud.
Maybe if I named myself
Atreides. The gay
Kwisatz Haderach.
The one who plays
the keyboard shirtless.
Who flirts
with fire effortlessly.
Whose shifting sands are noiseless
over the drone of now-daily climate anomalies,
and governments seeking to
distract
from multiple catastrophic follies. I only interact
with the desert at very particular times of the night. When
this land finally, briefly, flickeringly
comes alive.
Vincent, as he was portrayed
with Amy and the Doctor—
he helped me survive my own suicide
so I could face this.
The Beladin Dune Sea, rushing up
to drown Khar-Toba,
and the Purple Dragon, raising one chocolate brown fist
in defiance.
Will we all be consumed by straits so dire
that they do not bear repealing?
I never tire
of watching the sunflowers bloom
all across your worlds within. Don't admire
me for my honesty. I am only a lonely creole woman-man
desperately sifting through the last of Khar-Toba
as the jets scream ever closer
that whatever this world has been avoiding
is very, very close at hand
like a paintbrush.
Like a picture.
Like a portrait of the artist
as a very, very young last stand.