I Am Worried (a poem)

by ALEXANDER OPICHO
in Fall 2022

Karim Brown, from On Being a Child, 2022

I am worried

I am bi-curiously worried

the landlord will lock

my house tomorrow

with a huge padlock

I will be punished for what I am,

Again, I am worried of beards

on my face that hosts loud voice

from depth of my windpipe

vocally backwards to assigned

the station I earned from those

defining what to hate and to love

I am more worried of tomorrow

I will lose my job for what I did

not chose to be, just a piece of cog

in the wheel of nature's diversity

channeled to love within my tunnel

untethered to the convention of narrow,

but still wildly neurotic in hatred,

I am worried of self-hatred tomorrow

For bound to be a pet of the empty

and yawning jaws of hungry stomach

poverty harvested from transphobia,

only fibres that bricks up culture's wall

therein housed sun's death of my kin,

I am worried of my daughter

May be come tomorrow she will be

deschooled for her bisexual promise

getting culled to lead the binary reign

by those who salute not nature for her

unbounded power in the infinite gifts,

I am worried...

---

Alexander Opicho is a Kenyan poet. His mother gave him six names: Alexander Khamala Ernesto Namugugu Islam Opicho. He is passionate about writing short stories, critical essays about culture, politics, and literature as well as crusading for the rights of the powerless women, children, landless, non-binary sexualities, and the minorities. His poems have appeared in the Caribbean Writer Magazine, Face-2-face-Africa, Luraris Review, Praxis Online Magazine, the Boda-Boda Anthem, the Buwa Journal, the Homintern Magazine and the Transnational Journal of Literature. He has been anthologized in the Agbowo, the Shallow Tales Review, Haiku Africa and the Queer Africa II.  He has a dream  to plant a million trees, weight-lift seven-hundred kilograms, and speak with fluency, five foreign languages. He is guided by a philosophy that the practice of literature is a praxis of freedom.