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THE ALLEYNIAN 710
Artwork – Elaab Tsegaye (Year 10)
Sugar, Sugar Jamie Chong (Year 13)
I am a bleached grain of sand that has seen too much:
boiling houses like smog in London rising and coming down like hellfire;
my brothers melt and reappear in crystallisations of ecstasy. So preserved that we are toxic, poison, dangerous; we are death between your lips. The hands that churn and turn, calloused and worn out, are replaced by another man’s, his life paid out by metal sums. I see the ones who eat, eat, eat, do nothing but consume, from their porous skin exudes the blood of those they killed. All returns to where they once came. Born from red streams, destined to dissolve back into those fat arteries, I am bound and birthed for this fate. Homeland stripped, left me naked like women misused, abused. I am so empty yet full of regret. Born dark from pounded cane, I am made lighter and lighter. Powdered gold cannot look like the hands of their maker. From that day when I am white like them and the statues that they have stolen, I am Aphrodite Areia and I will wage vicious war. Invade their mouths like salvos as they turn black, black, black. All returns to darkness again.
I am the root of their dying rust, my death will bring a victory to all who’ve lost their lives for the sickly sweet, saccharine stickiness of self-destruction. I am dopamine, death, Dionysus, the bubbles of champagne and wine, master of addiction, the king of highs. The birth of an empire and its end, a capitalist currency, drowning, dying. I was born to die and die and die again. What a curse it is to be immortal, so I will throw myself at death and be unafraid.
They made me to live eternally, wrapped in flawless foil where I crinkle like cracked cellophane. Flash like Hector’s helmet, metal like the gold of their decaying lives.
After all, we return to darkness again.
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