Better a Kurdish cage,
inside Germany’s white-walled asylum,
than their streets
full of Romanians, Germans, Turks.
Better a fellow Kurd,
fluent in Kurmanjî,
spitting “Turkish” at me
while swallowing Germany’s pills,
than to breathe outside
where they erase my name.
Better the silence inside,
where I still know who I am,
than their freedom outside,
where Germany forces me
to call myself a Turk.