From 2014…trying to tell people how we hide…
They leave marks, tears. Look.
You can see them if you stand
eyes akimbo and uncrossed from normal.
They don’t show if you look usual-like.
But they shimmer
like living starry
liquid songs of sorrow…
From last year, a poem describing leaving a place of fruitful becoming and ending up in a place of religious bondage…it wormed its way out of me freely and insisted on the geographical terms, which now in the age of ttaf make far more sense to me.
we had wine
rose wine, pink
blushing with laughing
joy in the midst of
a light crushing
we were in Provence,
and it was warm and sultry
but not thick or sweaty
in that yellow light seeping out of
the ruddy dirt…
This is an older poem, and I really like its rhythm. Try reading it aloud, for you will find that the sound of the words shapes how you say the coming ones.
These words are my offerings burnt
singed in fires of pain and hurt
written as gouts of bright blood spurt
from my contrite soul.
I take treasure from my heart
pleasures, pains, my every dart
burn them for a brand new start
the incense of my spirit …
This article is a powerful examination of how privilege works…and shows that trump the absolute fucker is the collective mirror image of privileged people in the USA, even those who do not have copious wealth and yet still retain utter privilege as elites in our country.
I am trying to imagine a whole four years of this corrosive soul…and I cannot. I imagine that those who place their trust in trump the absolute fucker will find themselves with no soul, having sold it in exchange for the delusions and empty nothing that trump the absolute fucker and his minions will visit upon us.
Empty, washed out and vacant souls, gaping like some bank had foreclosed on them, and stained forever with the blood of millions.
“He is, as of this writing, the most mocked man in the world. After the women’s march on January 21st, people joked that he had been rejected by more women in one day than any man in history; he was mocked in newspapers, on television, in cartoons, was the butt of a million jokes, and his every tweet was instantly met with an onslaught of attacks and insults by ordinary citizens gleeful to be able to speak sharp truth to bloated power.
“He is the old fisherman’s wife who wished for everything and sooner or later he will end up with nothing. The wife sitting in front of her hovel was poorer after her series of wishes, because she now owned not only her poverty but her mistakes and her destructive pride, because she might have been otherwise, but brought power and glory crashing down upon her, because she had made her bed badly and was lying in it.
“The man in the white house sits, naked and obscene, a pustule of ego, in the harsh light, a man whose grasp exceeded his understanding, because his understanding was dulled by indulgence. He must know somewhere below the surface he skates on that he has destroyed his image, and like Dorian Gray before him, will be devoured by his own corrosion in due time too.
“One way or another this will kill him, though he may drag down millions with him. One way or another, he knows he has stepped off a cliff, pronounced himself king of the air, and is in freefall. Another dungheap awaits his landing; the dung is all his; when he plunges into it he will be, at last, a self-made man.”
Source: Rebecca Solnit: The Loneliness of Donald Trump | Literary Hub
A few older poems for you ❤
Constance, I am working on a poem right now that is soo luscious and really just sorta pouring outta me…I am not trying to stopper the flow or even shape it right now. It is just the gushing…
Together
We have nurtured
A small sprout
A sapling
A tiny spring
We fed with time
We watered with tears
Our endless selfish bull shit
Gave food to this living child
Of ours… Our love, Love
This garden of delight
This torrent of life
This fire of fires
now and again
here and there
then and then
again and again
more and more
Written long looong ago, when this lil crabbie “Cancer”
was becoming friends with a lil scorpion Scorpio…
a match made in heaven and forged on earth.
It was trying to project into the future,
based on the past and spoken in the (then) present.
I hope you enjoy it. I know
if you met my beloved you would admire her as I do.
❤
There is a tenderness
in your eyes
in your voice
a trembling
so I can never
tell whose mother
or little girl
you might be
and even I
must believe it
tonite, remembering
in your eyes
such a tenderness…
Over the years I have jotted down uncounted numbers of haiku…
because it is a powerful tool in capturing imagery and heart flows…
and recently, I have been trying to focus more
on the process and reason why haiku is that tool,
that “turbo-charger” of the imagination, if you will.
I think it is that deep awareness of the nature of “nothing”
that one finds in the heart of much eastern spiritual thought.
Here are some of my attempts to find
the confluence where east meets west
and the waters mix.
rain-filled ruts reflect
an apple red summer sky
that highlights brown hills
in the wind my skin
revels amidst bitter-sweet
echoes of that day
wind, you will have a
terrible time smothering
my soft clarity…
i sit in winds
and let my shawl flow
loose around me
and lifted like wings
and as it unfurls
the hard ground exhales
and i become light
as i sit in winds
my heart rises up
when liberty sings
though limbs sit so still
though limbs sit in winds…
look for me, search
in my solid words…
and you will miss me
in their sparkle-spazzle
and solid spunk echoes.
i’m in the spaces
in between my words
shining and shim’ring
in dance-implications…
This is a simple love poem…it’s about that moment, that one timeless on-the-precipice moment
the one that you wish would never end…
Source: To Come Back To | Charissa’s Grace Notes
it’s that moment
when lungs forget
how to billow
in and out faithful
when air is tangible,
shimmering silvery-alive,
right before our
hushed wide eyes
that moment when
we both know finally…
These days I cannot tell
the difference between
Lara Croft and Laura Wilder
Didn’t they both face mummies?
Didn’t they both raid tombs?
Didn’t they both find secrets?
It’s somewhere between
prairies and pearls
that the line extends
to connect their hearts.
A poem about the fingers of God inside the fears and frailties of a woman. And yes, I am cognizant of the implications, and wonder why this is not more commonly experienced by others…the touch of God is so very intimate…
I feel your fingers
in my folds and
my fine feathers
ruffling, riffing
sometimes ripping
for your pleasure
folding me and
creasing me
until I do not
recognize
the shape
I’m in.
Turning this way…
I am gunna begin reposting older poetry, here on Grace Notes…because Facebook is a wasteland of the driest thirstiest most stingy desert sand that has ever been. Proverbs would say that Facebook has two sisters: “Give” and “Give”.
My older work is good…at least, in my own internal scales of what I like and do not like, it weighs out as treasure. I feel it in my bones…it RINGS of true truth. But it is unwieldy, this blog, in getting to those older poems…one must make time and space to even find them, let alone to eat them and digest them…
…because my poems are not immediately burnable carb calories…
Anyway…here they are, such as they are.
This particular poem is about finding my voice as symbol of finding myself. It examines paradigms and presuppositions, and advocates for freedom from old superstitions and lies…and freedom to timeless Truth.
I still struggle to dig it out,
that splinter you shoved into me,
down my throat without so much
as a shot of whiskey or
a shot in the dark.
and you are so certain, sure
of how to walk the world an…
Source: Unfurling From A Set-Free Throat | Charissa’s Grace Notes
you’re there
I see you in the
glow, the fierce proud
glow that melts snow and
vaporizes anything in the know
you hold
your bouquet
of blooming hatred
tight, vise-like, clutched
and gathered to your chest
where it
burns everything
it melts anything that
even thinks about getting
close-like, including your fingers
clutched
gripping
so tight
that you cannot
shake it off of them
your fingers and your face
so that your heat could even
get shared.
And though Your feet find every path
how is it I can see no sign
that You have ever cared to pass
along this trail, travail of mine?
I, pauper-heart and paper mind
bequeathed with Heaven’s own dear Breath
look at this empty road to find
it circles, curls unto my death.
That I stand asking is itself
a rich and bottomless grand gift
and that I scrabble at Your Shelf
and fumble, clumsy drop and sift
Until there’s nothing left to see
while all around me diamonds gleam
Until I take my eyes off me
then shall dust to riches be
The gifts are not in garlands rare
Nor ease nor comfort fading fast
Thy gift is very Breath, it’s Air
With me til I breathe my last.
I am wearing the turmoil of Spring in my hair
I have worn it so young and so old
It’s for you that I wear Spring so zestfully there
For your heart, I am wearing Spring without a care
For your soul, well I wear Spring so bold.
But you rush thru the seasons so fast and so blind
Looking into the future so blurred
It’s for me that you strain your eyes, trying to find
Something different, a lodestone to anchor your mind
Alas, you miss the damage incurred.
I guess pacing is part of the problem, my dear
You pull hard, while I toddle along
For whatever our eyes rest on, touch on, hold near
those things take flesh and blood then they stoke up your fear
And they co-opt your voice and your song.
Can we walk thru the seasons together, our hands
Clasped gently yet joined as we wait?
You can see far, rejoice in the coming of that
I can see up close, making the moments grow fat
While the seasons just slip out the gate.
It is
a strange spiraling
of meaning…
draining out
of works that
felt pregnant
with them…meanings…
Meaning.
Now?
prowled and picked over
by hurried lazy eyes
losing meaning, my poems,
like a bike tire
like a sleek balloon
gone sad and pudgy
from too many bon-bons.
See, I write them
in such a way that
it is the reader plugging
into them
that births that meaning
each one is pregnant with…
and the reader midwifes their
own “poem” in the interaction.
but I look at poems now…
living creatures that slid
into this world and onto the page
in my tears of all stripes and moods…
born of water and Spirit…
and they just seem silly, like debris
in maelstrom currents mixing with cast off Micky D wrappers
and the latest pop culture Rapper
hanging in the wastelands with the other vultures.
it is stunning, really…that they really
do not matter to anyone like they do to me…
these lil “Tardises” of words…they are just…
forlorn, they are petals after they have been
trod on by the wedding party and the departing guests
and now are at best mere curiosities better suited
for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not
instead of Lord I believe help me in my unbelief.
I think I wept
for two days
after this…
it was
so
beautiful
as it shouldered
its way in and it left me
shaking and trembling and speechless.
I think I literally babbled as I wrote.
(Sometimes I do that when I get hit
with Creative Fire…I just babble
without words because the
UUUNNNGGGHHH of creating is too
AAAUUUGGGHHHH!!!!)
And then I see the latest
hater-aide clever meme
get hit millions of times
as everyone goes
“O00000h!!! BUUURRRNNN”
and pours another cup of coffee
(one more cup of coffee before I go)
and snaps their fingers where
the newspaper used to live and
pulls up their light-stained cheeks
to the latest send up to entertainment.
And this compulsion to share…
this fucking HOPE that someday
someone would read them
from the inside out
and have their OWN babbling
UUUUNNNNGGGHHH and
AAAUUUGGGGHHH
and the words would snap to,
alive and burning and twine
into the human being’s
very own unique living poetry
just for them
and them alone.
the rocks are weepy tonight
in the mist they hide,
like a sorrowful bride
beneath her veil so misty-thin,
so impenetrable.
the trees lean grey and low
in acts of love and sacrifice
and yet their branches can’t suffice
the blow, the brunt the rocks endure
in the endless name of Time.
and out upon the roiling sea
I dance the waves and they dance me
and we keep time to metronomes
so deep and quiet that their song
may simply be the sound, the weep…
the tears of the weepy rocks 
I draw attention to this because every single one of these people at this dinner thinks that transgender people are anywhere on the continuum from “insane and mentally ill” all the way to “demon possessed”.
Each of these people supports discrimination against LGTBQIA people. Every Single One.
These shills are there with trump the absolute fucker telling him that he is God’s Servant when he is carrying forward towards becoming law actual statutes that are the equivalent of death warrants for people as they lose their access to medical services and will simply die.
In the guise of “religious liberty”.
The list in 1 Corinthians 6 that is used as the cudgel against LGTBQIA individuals contains many things, ALL of which refer to behavioral expressions of basic violations of human beings by the exercise of power over one another. The list is not a prohibition of actual things (such as speaking, such as sexual activity of any orientation, such as possession of property), but rather condemns forms of each of the things I mentioned (adultery, theft, lying, malice (which is hatred), and a specific form of homosexual activity that is widely held by all serious scholars to be condemning a specific homosexual relationship that involved the subjugation and oppression of one of the participants in a power dynamic that was akin to sexual slavery)…
Why do I mention this? Because it is this list that is cited to oppress LGTBQIA human beings…while the same people who do this willingly serve people who lie, steal, cheat, run around on their wives…essentially ANYTHING that cannot be seen or is not admitted to!
But let someone be open about their sexual orientation or gender orientation and they are ostracized, shunned, and often literally physically assaulted.
This is who you have become, evangelical christendom (I will not shit on the word “Church” by letting it apply to you).
In this passage from Isaiah 10, we discover why these actions are a stench to God:
“Woe to those who decree unrighteous decrees, who write misfortune, which they have prescribed to rob the needy of justice, and to take what is right from the poor of My people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless.
What will you do in the day of punishment, and in the desolation which will come from afar? To whom will you flee for help? And where will you leave your glory?
Without Me they shall bow down among the prisoners, and they shall fall among the slain.
For all this His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still.”
Did you know that if the current proposed health care roll backs become law that it will result in a transfer of wealth of 300 billion dollars to the people in the country who make more than $250,000? Yes that is correct: the top 1% are going to get even richer…
These things matter in concrete terms of life and death…but they also matter in that the hypocrisy of these people at this dinner and every single person who supports these people is now on prominent display…the party of the goats who wail “Lord Lord when did we see You hungry or sick or naked or in jail” is forming up fast.
This is your chance to turn from your lazy, mindless, sinful supporting of an evil evil party and an amoral greedy titular head of that party…and return to your first love.
The book of James says this about “true religion”:
Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.
Not the flocking to the side of a man who is willing to do your bidding to make it possible for you to literally hurt, destroy and murder the oppressed and the defenseless.
I will not associate or participate with anyone who actively supports these individuals and their leader, trump the absolute fucker.
The day before he signs an executive order on religious liberty.
Source: National Day of Prayer: Donald Trump White House Dinner | Time.com
Last year on this day this poem came to me, along with feelings of overwhelming grief…
today, after the hunters began their work yesterday, legislative guns blazing and celebrating after…
today it makes sense.
we soared high on currents,
uplifts unseen by human eyes
but oh so visible to us,
we dancers in the skies…
ever young and long did we thus fly
until we tired and we had need of
landing, resting…
Written for My Father…
“…and then you turn your head
your beautiful estrangéd face
to the other side of midnight
and behold that silky rain
(as if for the first time)
that Never Ending Irish Rain
fell green across the golden waters
and washing down those greying sands,
quiet, themselves ablaze, a-falling
like stars straight thru the night…”
Source: Never Ending Irish Rain
The place of Beauty
in a broken, breaking world,
how to recognize it
rather than define it,
those moments that stop us
dead in our fatal tracks.
Do you know beauty
is conducive to stillness?
It isn’t that which excites
or makes us want to replicate it…
Source: Haunted, Haunting Beauty
“it has long been rumored
there was a night, that night
when Juliek, on brink of death
played Beethoven so hauntingly
in the dark for dying men, starved,
doomed to meet dark doom so soon
but regaled in that lurking dark
with beauty’s fire unquenchable…”
Source: Haunting Beauty, Redux
I am posting this for those readers who still may not understand the complex physiological and psychological factors that work together to form our gender orientations.
In light of the fact that the Bible is utterly silent regarding the so-called “morality” of gender, this article could be especially helpful for those of you who claim you love Jesus and yet treat transgender humans like Hell.
May God spare you the kind of treatment that you have handed out to others in the name of Jesus…but that is not how it works, is it? The fact of the matter is that the exact standard that you employ to show your rejection and hate of transgender humans is the one that Jesus will hold up for you on your day of dawning…
sometimes scared I hear
the stink and the hot blood
rushing thru the crowds
like demons on the loose
the hounds of Torquemada
sometimes I see them
all the people in the streets
lost and in a mumble
of pain and crazy jumble
and death in every tumble
and I just wanna lay there
in the streets so dirty
teeming with the garbage
of privileged excrement
and tear my chest wide open
and with my desperate fingers
claw my hurt ribs agape
and reach in for my heart
and rip it from my soul
and hold it over head
and let my blood gush forth
in step with all my tears
and wash it all away
why can’t it wash away
oh Jesus wash, oh Jesus
why is it them not me
i think I’m gunna cry
and cry and cry and cry
while my heart bleeds and bleeds
until it’s bled all dry
“…and the nuance is gone,
disappeared in the mist
along with soft kisses,
it’s all been dismissed
by orange fading soft
into white then returning
to orange, and orange
and then just more orange
so i sit here, i wait,
i remember another time,
other days full of
sweet music and rhyme…”
Source: Nothing Rhymes Orange
Standing beside gull-force winds
strong enough to blow a waterfall
back into its own face, something
no man has experienced but needs to
I watch Beauty roll down and meet unbelief.
And I remember all over again how I am haunted
by the ghost that grows when Beauty glows and screams
to the body transcendent and compelling and
then goes silent once again
a waterfall thundering down
and pushed away with every might
and longing stirs all over again
as I just wonder how it is
that God can be resisted, how
that God has chosen suffering, now
in person and in heaven, wonder
that God is…that God is…that
then the song is sung by Beauty’s
absence in the scattering
the scurrying, no one cannot not be aware
and longing for the shelter
of The Safe Wing Stretched Divine
though it feel ominous, and gone and here
the absence of what cannot leave
beauty…or itself.
a guillotine to answer to the knife in my clenched fist
and I realize I must go thru this once again, this absence
that leaves all things scattered, scurrying, suffocating
in the Stripping of the Altar, in the scattering of all
and the sound of tombs slammed shut
and the sound of screaming triumph
and the sound of darkness looming
and the sound of Beauty Silent
all compel a halt to movement
so we listen in the stillness
to the absence, to the absence
to the looming screaming absence
and the Sound of Beauty Silent
everyone denied it.
that He was killed
that He was alive
that there was a Door
that the Door was closed
everyone denied it.
that there was it.
that it was.
that she was dressed
that she was it.
She knew better
because dawn had done
and blue was shining
in her golden hope
She knew open and empty
were Something.
Born transgender…
concealed…
in rushes, in tulies
wandering deserts
and walking lonesome valleys…
and we walked around the sun
50 times, spinning, circling
while I, spinning and circling
spiraled out of myself
torn in two
or maybe parted
by Solomon’s Silver Blade
my inner me stifled and screaming
“Give Her Away! Give Her Away!”
as he just shrugged and said
“I don’t wanna be here anyway”
but then to come to myself slow
trickling back home
and draining up and in
before coming out
the sun so bright
the wind so fresh
creation dancing
and the stink of hate and horror
and the sting of brutal spittle
and eyes that bruise and stab
and the cries of the powerless
and the silence of the othered
and the dust of death settling
I dance, I sing, I SHOUT!
I whirl and lift that dust to the wind
as my offering of violent worship
of our Liberty God, Our Graceful GOD
our LOVING GOD
and I hear Their loving strong whisper:
“For such a time as this you were created”
and I take my place with Esther
and take Mary of Bethany’s hand
and settle into this truest truth for me:
“My maids and I will fast likewise.
And so I will go to the king, which is against the law;
and if I perish, I perish!”
And again…from Last Year:
it was a village
no longer existing
it was a laugh
that echoed that village
and hung in the air
like smoke from a fire
extinguished in nightfall
and drifting in winds
and lonely midst stars
while crickets and frogs
lament as it faded
and pebbles and diamonds
all heaped up at random
and sticks and steel swords
all jumbled together…
Source: A Handful of Memory
My own poem from last year…I do really favor this one.
it looks the same to you
whether you stand
in winter or summer
…the gate of my heart…
Source: ever Spring, ever Autumn
in that place…
it only exists
between your lips
when you are sleeping
and I am awake…
it’s the same place
between the dark
freshly plowed field
and the deep night sky…
I live there, quick
in every dear breath,
in between them as well
touching your parted teeth
the way moon touches sea
my love touches you
your want touches me
I am a doorway
eternity dwells
and we enter thru
in every dear breath.
Do you know the place where the light passes in?
That’s where you’ll find me when darkness is seeping
from crevice and cranny while Spring trudges weeping
I sit in the place where the light passes in.
You’ll find me there singing of beautiful life
and of faith like pure gold burnished shiny with hope
as my tears fall like diamonds so soft in the wind
In that place where the light, where the light passes in.
Listen…you barely can sound out the echoes
that buzz in the trees and bounce off the crags
and run back and forth from my mouth to my chin
In the place where the light passes in, passes in
It’s tempting to think that I never have lived
a sad day or bad day when dark gathers grim…
But I have…what’s the secret? Outside and In?
Why I let the light pass thru, and out, and then in…
I’m the place where the light, where the light passes in.
the fog gathers, nesting
over the deep quiet glen
dialing down sunlight
damping every sound
in this gloam my supple soul
nestles in, gives up control
and ceases struggle to be good,
or important, or subtle
and she feels the fog like still joy.
if you wish to care for the soul
you must decide it matters
more than human life
and simply know…still
We set out on tender feet
and tender hearts to match
and faces become flint as we
determined that we would not faint.
When our sojourn was hip deep in heat
and we were well and away, out to sea
she told me of the heartbreak and the horror
and there how we did rain our tears…
We took turns (while we wiled the desert paths away)
swimming away from the ship of us…naked, vulnerable
and healing in the slick water…further and further
and then return and up and back into our desert ship.
It was in the sunset wrought with haze from distant destinations
that make you think about fire, and about what might have been.
We, perched on that rock solid emanating heat and spitting healing
while the sky, bruised by our advances, turned purple in our song.
It was just Day Umpteen Kazillion in our great traverse of deserts,
we walking, swimming straight by myth and extraterrestrial,
feeding on lizards, trilobites, and our sacred Stories our Communion shared
and we, oh so close to our arriving, our becoming, our sacred Desert Story.
Simple, slow
embodied in sinew
and oiled with sweat
traversing territory
between the heart
and the mind…
this is the song of the strong soaring soul
this is the song of the wind in the night
this is the song of retreat into wholeness
this is the song of those swaying stars swinging
in the midst of the tumult of hurried compassion
dwelling in antipode virtue of soul
mired in distant connection called intimate
sucking the bloated cold teat of efficiency
this is the loss of the soul…
and what of me?
I am not quick, yet
I move like the lightening
singing and zinging and sizzling bright
kissing the stars and empowering earth
this is the land that I haunt with my life
Sometimes when
I am in the presence
of the royal mountain
I can’t help myself.
I run purple, violet
I feast on fallen blossoms
(somehow the fallen sing more
of loss, of all that comes before
Resurrection
in purple flow
For all who want to:
A: Understand transgender issues and origins
B: Want to be allies in the granting of human rights
C: Believe that being a christian precludes hateful condemnatory behavior
D: Have a trans loved one(s) that you wish to support
This article is for you.
I personally have experienced every single thing mentioned in this article. As a full grown middle aged human…the loss of family connection; the loss of employment; the loss of social standing, the hate-filled behavior towards me of literal total strangers; physical violence…
…not to mention the sort of thing that happened when I was little, and my choice of dissociation from myself. Only God can ever really measure that damage done as a child…damage that was not “intentional” but was fully empowered by the cultural forces of the binary and thus did no less damage.
This mom literally tried all the things that transgender rights opponents espouse…read her story. A conservative christian family with bona fides that may well make St Paul’s head spin! The accusation that parents’ poor parenting is responsible for the “mental illness” of the child is revealed as the false belief that it is.
This child is amazingly strong and persistent. I did not have that strength…I caved…and nearly died for the next 50 years.
All this damage, all this death…all because of clothing, genitalia, and bathrooms.
And trump supporter? Please pay special attention to the reporting of the trump administration’s specific and deliberate plans to take away transhuman rights! Just exactly as I told you. Supporting this absolute fucker taking office is the deliberate empowering of someone who wants to hurt me…
as if you could what…beat the trans out of us? Pray it off of us? Be sure and notice in the pull quotes below the full grown relative who vows to send this little kindergarten kid to the hospital on a stretcher if that child was in a restroom that his 22 year old niece was in!!!
That is literally flabbergasting to me! Really!!??? What is a 5 year old child gunna be able to do to a 22 year old woman??
No matter how many…no, even if you slaughtered every single transgender person? We would be back in the next generation…because we are a function of human reproduction, and not a function of “social engineering”
“…No matter how much punishment this kid got, you couldn’t beat it out of her,” Kimberly said. “You couldn’t pray it out, I couldn’t cast it out.” Indeed, Kai was having none of it. Sometimes she would wait until Kimberly was on the toilet to taunt her from just out of striking range: “You know I’m a girl.” Other times, she began praying within her mother’s earshot that God would “let Joseph” (Kai’s former name) “go home and be with Jesus.”
Kai’s prayer was Kimberly’s breaking point. That, and learning about the sky-high suicide rate for trans kids; according to one study, 41% of trans youth had attempted suicide—a rate almost ten times higher than their cisgender counterparts.
“There are so many trans kids who don’t have her persevering, persistent spirit,” Kimberly said. “And if Kai didn’t have that spirit, I would have succeeded in breaking her, into conforming into what I was trying to make her be. And we would have all been ok with that until she killed herself, at 14, or 13, or 11, or 20, or 50….
“…Still, the social fallout for Kimberly was swift. Trans advocates often say “everyone loses someone” when they transition; Kimberly’s family lost almost everyone. While one of Kai’s uncles helped his niece pick out new outfits, most of her extended family distanced themselves. One aunt threatened to call CPS on Kimberly. Other relatives shared a Facebook post from a Houston-area preacher, proposing a training day where the church would teach children how to spot and report trans kids at their schools. A cousin sent Kimberly a Facebook message warning if he ever saw Kai in a bathroom with his 22-year-old daughter, Kai would “need a stretcher.”
“A best friend from the family’s church, where Kimberly served in ministry for years, stopped their years-long 5 AM prayer phone calls. When Kimberly attended a school board meeting last June to discuss the accommodation of trans students, she said one pastor from her church showed up to speak out against them…”
Source: The unlikely Texans fighting anti-trans bill SB6 | Fusion
trump supporter, pay attention. Do yourself a HUGE favor and read this article…it will save you from grievous regret!!
A lifetime of living for truth is being flushed down the toilet.
I give credit to the child for understanding: SHE has profited from what her father participated in…and has blood money.
I believe that Business Insider is reputable. trump supporter: You cannot hide your head in the sand of “only FOX news”…remember when in school and the scientific method was taught…apply that here, confirmation of truth from a preponderance of the evidence and from a plethora of sources…
but that takes work…it does not go down easy like FOX’s pre-chewed gummy bear news does.
A lawyer wants to know who was influencing Yanukovych when he ordered Ukrainian security forces to crush protests. One name that has emerged: Paul Manafort.
Source: Manafort’s daughter’s hacked text messages lead to calls for probe – Business Insider
…it’s contained in this article…incident after incident after incident…and the links to the primary documents.
That is what real news looks like.
This is talking about my own life, my own family…and yours, too…because all of us have this brokenness. The evidence is irrefutable.
This poem is all about forgiveness…trying to give it and trying to receive it…and the incredible revelation that it is impossible.
There is no trying…there is only becoming.
“…And so now we get down to it:
there is no exit,
no escape from agony,
pitstop from pain…
all we can do is
exchange suffering’s form
and it’s face, from our own
for the pain of another…”
Yunno…toilets are sort of important. Life has improved SO MUCH since their invention and use…
Sometimes the greatest service a person can be to another person is to be a toilet…and the most immediate act of forgiveness is to flush it down.
I had an experience like that this week…and am working on the things I wrote about in the picture…
by being a toilet that flushes, and not one that is stoppered up and back-flows shit everywhere.
Source: The Suffering of Forgiveness
I am re-posting this today…it is particularly apt this week.
Your vain cold words wielded stark like an ax
against a tree because you’re cold in spite
of conflagration blazing behind you
but that ax slinks solo chopping at that
frozen sea, once us, so insufficient…
and now? It is just more ice-pick chipping,
adding to that devastating sea
of loathing and despair you wallow in,
you, leper in the Dead Sea of yourself.
And common grief can crack a frozen wall,
but frozen sea? Alas, this grief looms large!
Singular…and you giving, so giving…
but only of more death and dumb destruction…
where was this giving when there was something
more to give besides grief and a pecking,
a chippy picking needle peck peck peck ing?
I’m searching in corners dark, difficult
because the light is empty, Fool…and ‘neath
barrage of comments belittling, gory
I face our scandal torrid, flaccid, hoary (our story)
which is the scandal in every last story
that you refuse to read…instead you hide
in that pervasive smothering attitude
and as I gasp for breath and fumble with
my flaws in jagged close shuddering dark
you trumpet your search for beams of darkness
that occlude specks of light, light that, blinding,
irritates our eyes to tears and tears that
frozen sea to pieces, tears my frozen
flesh to pieces…tears me into pieces…
It’s difficult, this dimly lighted place
that requires much more, and then some more…
a merciful throne compels honesty,
transparency…that a dictator sees
as only weak capitulation…but
it is here…
In the shadow of incarnation, Here
I find the strength to walk this…this darkened path…
this darkened path of self-examination.
This was my being’s experience for too many years, and the first poetic attempt to deal with the major stronghold of my life…and the gif at the end…brrr…I lived in terror of those footsteps on the stairs, coming towards me with harsh words and blows…
Source: Abandonment
I am sharing this, written a couple years back…thinking now of those who literally believe that trump the absolute fucker is good for this country, this season of history.
The ONLY good thing that I can see is that his election tore off the masks and showed the real faces underneath, and what the worth of faith professed is…and isn’t.
Just in case it has not been obvious: I reject trump and everything he stands for and embodies. He is utterly at odds with the good news of the gospel. Until the day he repents and brings forth fruits commensurate thereof, I will call him the absolute fucker. I am not and will not be unequally yoked with him or his ilk.
I am stunned in the ripping of the masks…it’s as if I am watching the Yale debate team become “Lil Abner”.
He is maelstrom consuming and the earth disappears.
Read on if you dare
All it takes is a word…just one.
It gets free and yeah, so it trods a toe
but hey that’s okay cus the point is so
important, potent.
Then a couple words,
and a sideways slide
and down the hill
a ways
but that is acceptable
too, because this
is so important
well, the next thing you know
you’re in the WWE (even tho
you’re the good guy)
and death is okay because
you HAVE to fight
fire with fire.
Charissa's Grace Notes 
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