Who Will?
Channel: Dr. Faizan
Date: 2021-05-29

A video poem, written, performed, and edited by Dr. Faizan using Lumen5, an AI-assisted online video maker which generates content using stock footage and ambient music. Original poem as below:

Who Will?

Often I inhabit a body imagined
I feel as a woman when I must become a man
& when I inhabit the mustiness of soft clothes,
often I cling to my own skin, afraid
of the touch of a window’s breath
which sends shivers up the nakedness 
of who I am underneath these words

I inhabit the coldness I must survive
Often I become the mask in the mirror
until I can’t see what inhabits my own eyes
yet my soul is a handful of sparks set aflame
as soon as I am seen, as soon as I am written
and I know now that I empty myself into my flesh
so I can be inhabited by you, so I can be kindled again, 
led back to the shadows cast within the cave of being

I watch the shadows of bodies 
I might become someday
& when I am an old man I am also an old woman
for to grow old as a soul is to grow into another
& I refuse the shackles of skin framing me in
& someday time will cast its warm light on the faces
of all the souls whose sparks have fed our survival

I become the blur & the fumes of the edges of us
& of light & shadow, of skin, oil, vein, tooth, & dream

I wish to be baptized 
in the holy ocean 
of our oneness
yet I will 
never know if 
I’m teetering at 
the liminal edge 
of rebirth or 
death, of 
the blade, the 
bleeding, or 
the flesh

for it will not 
matter, for I 
will no longer be 
just my body
but ours.
Let it all
be 
ours.