Listen to my poem Two Diverging Roads
Prologue to Two Diverging Roads:
Why do men have nipples? Because a fetus is created female until the seventh week, when chromosomes decide whether a fetus will be born male.
According to the theory of reincarnation, every time we’re reborn, we choose our fate, i.e. our gender and the circumstances in which we are born.
Two Diverging Roads
Imagine how close you were to the precipice,
How slim the probabilities,
When you stood trembling at that terrible chasm,
You knew nothing, you knew everything,
When the apathetic hands of creation,
Plunged you deep in that obscure, dubious, surreptitious well,
Inside the impossible darkness of a woman’s womb,
An egg, a zygote, a blastocyst, an embryo, then you had a heart.
A precarious amorphous thing, you turned into a tenacious fetus,
Burrowing under her skin, tearing out of her flesh, sucking on her energy, feeding on her blood, her breath was your air.
In the thunder and roar of her heartbeats, you heard a ticking clock, threatening you that time is running out,
Inside all that chaos, and fear, and turmoil, two lives diverged before you:
In the first, you live like a king, in the second you follow the king’s procession.
In the first, doors open for you. Opportunities lay at your feet. On a shiny silver platter, you’re offered every flavor of freedom, privilege and entitlement. In the second your fate is sealed, your options are few, your ambitions, your dreams, your hopes, a colorful, exotic bird, its wings clipped to stop it dreaming of the sky.
In the first you can hesitate, stall, falter, lapse, slip, blunder, fail, and fail, and fail, and fail, and all of your mistakes are swept under the rug, forgotten, erased. In the second you’re disciplined, and judged, and alienated, and dehumanized, and shunned, and shamed, and punished, and ostracized, and persecuted, and prosecuted. You are taught that society cast and molded the chains of your disgrace without a key.
In the first you walk, you skip, you run, you jump, you’re light, you’re carefree, you rip/tear the shirt off your back, not fearing assault or attack. In the second, you are taught to be afraid, to be careful, to always be alert, to carry mace, to stay close to home, not to go alone, not to go far, to keep your head down, to dress modestly, to walk apologetically, to find a safer route, to come home before dark.
In the first a benevolent gentle God you yourself created takes your hand, answers your prayers, leads you, saves you, forgives you, exalts you. In the second a sexist, misogynistic, ruthless, hostile God controls your body, degrades your mind, diminishes you, promises you nothing but punishment and burning.
Two roads split before your eyes,
Two roads that lead to two very different lives, one well-trodden and plowed, the other riddled, with hardship, and strife.
And in all this tumult, loss, and confusion. You chose the first.
