David Diop

I offered him only mistaken thoughts, thoughts commanded by duty, thoughts condoned by a respect for human law, and I was not human.

Once you were dead, your hands finally immobile, finally at rest, finally released from their shameful suffering by your last breath,

I let you plead with me for reasons that were corrupt, because of thoughts that arrived fully formed, too well dressed to be honest.

I waited a bit, stretched out next to your remains, and stared at the night sky, deepest blue blue, crisscrossed by the sparkling trails of the last tracer bullets.

The insides of the earth were outside, the insides of my mind were outside, and I knew, I understood that I could think anything I wanted to, on the condition that the others knew nothing of it.

that I had been inhuman by obeying duty’s voice. But I was now free to listen no longer, to no longer obey the voices that command us not to be human when we must.

No one knows what I think. I am free to think whatever I want. And what I think is that people don’t want me to think. The unthinkable is what is hidden behind the captain’s words. The captain’s France needs for us to play the savage when it suits them.

As soon as I left the trench sprinting, as soon as the trench birthed me and I began to scream, the enemy was in trouble.

A brief instant. The face of the enemy from the other side wasn’t gray

when I read in his blue eyes the screams his mouth can’t sling into the skies