Holy Infant so Tender and Queer Lyrics

I know you by your voice

Not the tilt or the tone

Or the pitch or the cadence

But the words

Self assured and bloated with privilege

An ominous knell

Of obnoxious righteousness

And self confessed validity

Polished, like a plaque

And displayed with the comfort

Of one who has never had it

Ripped from their chest

Like those who truly struggle

Instead, a litany of

Self assured traumas

And carefully curated struggles

Of misgendering

Giving up inheritance

Higher education

Tumblr reposts

Cancel culture

Acronym'd policing of queer brown suffering

Oh to be able to take queer etiquette lessons

And dip your toes into milquetoast activism

You are bastions of what we will never get

Of averted eyes and muted protest

Of safety in a bubble of privilege

Of obliviousness

Of the knowledge that the complaints

Of your pronoun pin-pricked fingers

Will always be louder and clearer

Than the loss of an entire diaspora

That your scrambled tofu breath

Will always smell sweeter to an oppressor

Than my most beloved perfume

That your tears pour easily and steadily over pallid microagressions

While our suffering is a drought

A famine, an echoing silence

In the wake of a trampling stampede of white feelings

How nice

To be able to scream at the masses and rage against a machine that has been padded for you

To take a baseball bat to a smooth shell

While we are twisted and tortured between

Cogs and pistons beneath

And below the surface

To be able to take things personally

As they actually see you as a person

Instead of a ticked box and societal burden

To continue the white tradition

Of exploiting brown labour, now emotional instead of physical

To smooth out your superficial scratches with us

The rubble of a colonised ruin

How nice to be palatable to the same tongue which lashes those you claim solidarity with

To share the same suffering by name and not experience

To allow the eye of this hate to victimise you and villainise me

To take comfort in the same silence

That we scream against

To police our spaces

As your grandfathers did our borders

So bring to us your keening masses

Of oat milk and organic produce

And pre mixed spice blends

Emulating the appealing struggle of my homeland

And bottle your fragility while you can

You cannot appropriate a conscience

I now know you by your silence

Guilty and deafening

Avoiding accusation

Rejecting accountability

Like a foreigner

At the border to your comfort zone

I am tired

Of buckling

Under the burden of your weaponised incompetence

Of my grief being painted angry shades of red

To your supposed colourblind eyes

I am sick

Of empty platitudes thrown over

Ignorance in expectation of praise

For the minimum

Of wearing the record of my bloodstained trauma to justify my rage

While you wear your rage as the justification itself

And I am done