I’ve held,

              all the fillings of a twenty-five-dollar panini, in my coconut head

doesn’t matter how pink the layers of flesh,

              always a brownface pores on the grill.

inner North, cultures go to die, swallowed in white cubes, domiciled

              turning inner monologues of what hides affordable

against the count of other meals

              I need that

week. I am thrifty with fillings,

              other gloved hands hover, I slowly back away

from thin clear skin layered on white bread, pleading single origin

              $4.50 Sri Lankan tea,

all the while, a palm tree

              postering for sunny Ceylon, on the pastels

you lick

              your fingers, of my ancestors,

over minimalist lattes.
I’ve scrubbed,

              to raw the bleeding infamy

of turmeric spreading across the pink

              of my nails, the cracked and earthen

smell, of cardamom, the shame, pressing down,

              of everything I touch

turning to mud, brown, in a sunburnt country

              with all white dreams, of virginal land rights

and maiden plains, to share. 
I diluted,

              everything,

to be like you.
but milky tea,

              is still tea,

however condensed.

              even, the milk of my father’s

Carnation brand, cracked lip of borrowed can,

              clandestine highs, trading sugars, cannot blunt

the tannic, dull agonies, the broached, and civilised tongue of

              your violent explorations.
I heard,

              chai was made by iridescent brown

women, adding clove, anise, whose fertility was

              stolen, under armed guise of civility, missions white-washed sympathies

when they couldn’t scrape

              black leaf for ever opening mouths

of trade, tongues they can’t turn away

              the appetites of empire

take their roasted leaves

              their flinted brown-ness,

for the tepid marsh

              of English Breakfast.

now they sell it back

              as Ceylon tea. the bitter, insolvent irony

of you all telling us, now,

              to get off your newly cordoned

country.
now you sip,

              turmeric lattes, and lavish me

with ayurvedic miracles, hand high to your sequined bindi,

              lisping off sideways, along the sweat of your ice tipped brow,

the almond magic

              you weave over title deeds, each bastard dish,

each buttered chicken, a monumental, imperialist tragedy,

              took our jewels, our ancient medicine, our spiced teas –
its appreciation, not appropriation, always so sensitive,

always with the race card ready, from the pocket of tight-lipped black jeans

don’t you want to be celebrated for who you are?
leave the race card locked tight away in that back pocket, otherwise,

that belt gets tighter and tighter, do not speak a history,

they do not believe.
the vice around

my coconut head, shavings white, underneath

the crusted brown husk. 
              vinyasa taught, woke-fully, in high ceilinged

halls, bone linen drapery, for seventy

              an hour, in the whitewall innards of the North, the ivory limbs all seasoned

in exotic oils, seeping through the artisanal cavities

              even artisanal, marked up sourdough loaves

is still white bread,

              with all its empty calories.