Dear Daniel,
You’re a mixed-up mixed-race mixed-face kid from the wrong side of the tracks with a hole in your soul and a hole in your arm
At school you were picked on and kicked on and spit on because you just didn’t fit no matter what you did so they’d medicate you to fake calm
They locked you in locked you out locked your existence up in doubt till you’re all washed up washed out barely past your teens
You could chuck it in right here right now
Sit down on the stool and throw in the towel
But you have this dream to strut your stuff and howl your truth and blaze and burn and daze and discern and live and learn and ignite on a stage that can sate your ruth and hold your rage
And it seems like a sure thing
That place of performance that presents as a space that is safe
For agitators
Dismantlers and mischief-makers
Movers and shakers
True believers and truth-seekers
For poets and provokers and players of poker holding pocket aces and multiple races
And singers of songs and righters of wrong who never really belong and dance away from the throng
A space that is safe
For debate or dissent
For depression or intent
That illuminates and advocates and coruscates but tolerates and cultivates while it liberates and elevates and reverberates with zest and zeal and
A Promise of the Real that can heal and unpeel and unseal your lonesome spiel
But you have to know they will often and repeatedly and seemingly endlessly say
You’re not clever enough or ever enough
Or Chinese enough or Korean enough or Japanese enough or Vietnamese enough or period-piece enough or Anglo-Saxon enough or decimal fraction enough that their world is not unified with your hybrid stain in the corner of the frame that fucks up their game and fries their brain that implies your pain because some of those people have never felt pain and they actually envy and covet and yearn for yours and that envy leaves them sore and mad and distorted and contorted with a sense of feeling thwarted and bereft and unsorted and repressed
So all they can do is reject you from the box where you just never fit
And eject you on the rocks where they hope that you’ll quit
And when you try and write a story they’ll want it tame and careful but not full of care and definitely not rare but generic and ‘representative’ not really chimeric and really very tentative and certainly not argumentative
They want to keep you in your place and lock you in a case
They want to cast you as the villain in their own simplistic drama
Be a plaster they can balm on their broke bleeding karma
And downsize and dismiss and despise and demystify you in their leaden saga but
You’ll always be a Mystery to Them
So shine on you crazy diamond
And when they dictate then you just defy
Climb on the roof and your freak flag fly
If they want to stop you they’ll need to buy a gun
And they’ll have to aim at your zig-zag run
You were put in this world to duck and to dive
You were made in adversity but you were made to thrive
And you’ll find your tribe and you’ll know how to move
Because no community organiser can match our groove
They can pay for their baubles but they’ll just never prove
A performative cipher can ever hold truth
Because this is your thing it was made in your style
It was forged in the flames of your sense of exile
It glitters and gleams in magnificent impurity
It has its fine line and its own morality
It dances and sings with the voice of the outcast
It ties its colours to the top of the mast
It bangs its drum in wild rhythm and rhyme
It sounds all wrong but all right at the same time
It’s all the hope in isolation anyone could long for
Mighty in spirit with its dragon roar
It’s the rebel song that won’t be turned down
It’s the light on the path from the dark side of town
Hold fast to your Dao it’ll show you the way
We’re all heading home at the end of the day
With love & respect
Your older (but not necessarily wiser) future self x
