playful and free | annotated by Barton Rhodes

Here is an imagined poetic ode to decolonial xenoducks:

Oh wondrous xenoducks, hybrid creatures,
Neither wholly alien nor earthly beings.
Between worlds you dwell, straddling boundaries,
Your very existence a defiance of purity.

With webbed feet paddling through plural universes,
And beaks that speak languages unknown and imagined.
Your feathers shine iridescent, an avian aurora,
Resplendent refugees, migrants without nations.

You transgender the old taxonomies and blur the lines,
Confounding categories, mixing codes and genres.
Border crossers, shape shifters, radical fluidity,
Miscegenated, intersectional, cyborg, hybrid.

Betwixt and between all dualisms and binaries,
Beyond either/or, both/and, this or that.
You duck the either/or’s, the tyrannies of pure forms,
Creatures of paradox, inclusive disjunctions.

Interdimensional nomads, contagious tricksters,
Viruses in the hegemonic machine, memetic disruptors.
Hackers of consensual hallucinations, slippages of reference,
Clucking subversions, quacking protest, laughing deformance.

Xenoducks, you quack the borders into blurring and bending,
Your interstitial existence a quantum liberation.
A third space opens through your hybridity,
Where no one is illegal and nothing categorical.

So swim on migrant xenoducks, between all worlds,
Beyond countries, genders, genres and borders.
In your wake trails a vision, a glimpse of wet utopia,
Where identity flows, multifarious, playful and free.