Foreign Vocabularies

You abandoned your mother tongue
because every word is much sharper
when it’s in the letters you say your last name in,
so you run away to a foreign vocabulary,
but it fails you over and over again,
it is so subtle, after all, you can only scream-
and rebel in the language you grew through.
There’s no place like home,
and languages are a home that lives within us.
So your writings will always bear a resemblance-
to Frankenstein’s monster,
native thoughts written in a foreign vocabulary.
As if you still walk back to your childhood home
and then turn away on the doorstep and go away to another place.
The maps are clear in your head,
but you choose to arrive at a foreign destination.
You avoid every declaration of native emotions,
yet the monster stands tall through it all.
Your metaphors are the sun of Arabia
even a foreign language can’t cool it down.
And it’s not your native language that is lacking,
nor is the foreign one better,
it is you who found an odd comfort-
in settling on a crossroad between two worlds.