A few days after this photo was taken by I was bashed in public. I was 25 years old selling out my poetry tour in New Zealand & Australia and I felt invincible. I wrote frequently and had so much confidence in my words. I was attacked right after delivering a keynote performance. On the outside I immediately bounced back: but I lost something profound in me that day and I am still trying to figure out what.
I felt like a fool: my words felt futile, metaphor seemed so far from the world of materiality which maimed me. I had decorated my life with stanza, but on the outside I was still seen and treated as a tranny. That inevitability devastated me: that for the rest of my life I would be reduced to my appearance no matter the tomes I wrote. I began to find it impossible to write poetry. I was angry at how it wasn’t physical, didn’t seem real as the violence I was experiencing.
Poetry had long been the way I accessed my interiority, the questions behind my declarations, my deep, deep felt. I didn’t want to go there — it felt too difficult to access my pain and still maintain a public life. I spent the next few years performing old work across the world, feeling like a charlatan. My embarrassment congealed like a hairball. The blank page became a site of terror, a mirror reflecting my own ineptitude. My friends kept telling me to “try,” but I would deliberately pack my schedule so that I never had time.
During quarantine for the first time in years I have time. For Poetry Month I am writing a poem every day. It’s been excruciatingly difficult, an emotional root canal. I am staying up until the early hours of the morning crying, but goddamn I am doing it — slowly. I am remembering why I wrote/write: in a world that says that people like me deserve to die, my poetry reminds me that I am real, capable, eternal. That man who bashed me took so many years of my he(art) from me, but I refuse to let him win.
I’d like to re-introduce myself: my name is ALOK and I am a writer. Certainly, I am beautiful, but wait until you read my words
