Sadly, Constance, “Animal Cruelty” is merely human beings being what they are…directed at animals.
It is what we have become…because when Animal Cruelty is directed at me, it is gender cruelty, and when it is directed at someone of a different race it is racial cruelty…
…who are we kidding? We are sick, and we need a cure.
| — | Sri Sri Ravi Shankar |
Sorry, male cis-gendered person…gotta call BS on this one.
The person spouting filth at me in front of kindergarten children? That was not just “in my mind”.
Constance…when you take your outrage for injustice out of your mind, your sense of compassion out of your mind and let it be incarnate in your actions in this world…THEN we will see some transformation!
But we shouldn’t be pressuring people to come out. Instead, we should be challenging the expectation that others are entitled to our identities.
No one should be demanding that people take on the risks of coming out. No one except you can make that decision. Your identity is yours, and no one else owns it.
You don’t owe anyone anything – especially not people who are ignoring your personal autonomy and safety by demanding that you come out.
via It’s Not All Glitter and Rainbows: 6 Harmful Myths About Coming Out — Everyday Feminism.
Constance…I face a lot of challenges in life that are in addition to the ones faced by all people simply as a condition of being in this world. If you have read here for awhile, you are acquainted with the gamut of these, and if you are new, well have a gander at the other posts ;-)…giggle.
My point is that it is the additional ones that kill. They are like the difference between running a marathon, and running one chased by dogs, and running one when you aren’t fast enough to keep from getting nipped numerous times on the run. And it is the nips that bleed, get infected, and drain…of vitality, of energy, and eventually of hope.
Right now the hardest of these challenges for me is that of making myself known to other people that are of utmost importance to me. They are mourning what they perceive as the loss of the person they knew, rather than perceiving it as the loss of the explanatory narrative that stitched together our common history.
For a whole host of reasons, some of them spiritual, some of them developmental, and most of them cultural/paradigm related, the onus and burden falls squarely on me in this process…to be the bigger person…to walk the second mile, or the third or the fourth, or however many miles must be walked…to turn the other cheek again and again and again…
My own identity is in need of justification, of proving, of validating, and the ways I respond either contribute to or detract from my right to be.
Judgement is passed on the narrative that I have, as it compares to the narrative that was.
Again…I get it. Fairness is not the operative determinant. But I want it to be understood: this is a costly gift, and gift I do think it is. It is not something that I owe…to anyone except myself whom I owe the debt of authenticity inner and outward. I think that my perspective on things is equally valid, is equally valuable and to be treasured. The “things I have lost” or the sense that “what I thought I had never existed” is just as real, as vibrant and legitimate for me as it is for anyone else who feels like they are being robbed.
Let me state it baldly: anything they are “robbed of” wasn’t real in the first place.
How about this: instead of the point of view that “a father I thought I had is now dead and replaced by you”, how about this: “I have a father who just happens to be a woman, and the idea I held that my father was also a male was an incorrect one. I am fortunate to be able to have this inaccurate understanding corrected while there is still time and life remaining to know this person that I valued and treasured as a father!”
Because this is my story…my history. I fathered four people…as a woman who inhabits a body that is biologically male. And as far as I am aware, my children always felt that I was a good dad to them, valuable in the love, acceptance and counsel that I offered them. And I am still here! The same person with the same ideas and same truths (and some newly understood ones too).
Perhaps instead of me saying over and over again I am sorry I am sorry…I am sorry for being…I am sorry for wanting to be, needing to be…maybe it could be thought about that a different sorry could be said…I am sorry that I held onto my own belief and insistence that a father has to be spiritually and biologically male and only that…I am sorry that I invalidated the lives and efforts of the millions of women who “fathered” young boys into men because there was no one else there.
I am posting this link, because it gets to a lot of the reasons why there is so much gravity behind the other narrative, the one that requires me to justify my right to exist, my right to pursue congruency, my right to be free from suicidal ideation, my right to feel okay about the truth that I did the best I could and while not a perfect parent did a pretty adequate job even compared to a cis-male…and as a transgender woman serving in the role of father and not knowing, well maybe I did an admirable job.
and maybe I suck. but I suck based on what I did and didn’t do, not based on whether I identfy as male or female…others who are insisting with actions that the actual measure of my being is in that identification are the ones who must grapple with the suckitude they frolic in!
Read the article…acquaint yourself with the myths…and then divest yourself of them for some clearer, more objective standards that we will all, together, be held accountable to…how we love one another, how we forgive one another, whether we divorce and separate ourselves or remain connected…those are things that will endure long after gender identification falls away as not needed.
Do Justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly.
This instrument, bound in time and dust and ashes
attacked by pressure and moments passing
wracked by neglect and careless stroking
of keys made of flesh and bone
has lost its continuity, lost its simple melody
cannot follow harmony
but mashes sound chromatic
and dissonant, dramatic
just echoes all the static
that rattles all around it,
neath the layers of grime
the passage of time
and each gender crime
I am starting to think that trans women and trans femmes — all of us linked by the cardinal sin of being named boys at birth, yet breaking the rules of boyhood and manhood — are trapped inside a traumatized story. From an early age, we are inundated with the story of our deaths, we relive it over and over many times before we actually die.
This same story is taken up, commoditized, and mass produced by communities outside of ourselves — media outlets looking for sensational stories, academics looking to produce research, and as Morgan Collado points out, even “LGBT” human rights organizations eager to use the statistics of transphobic violence to garner funds used to pursue the interests of cis, white gays and lesbians.
Even well-meaning liberal cis people, eager to earn “ally” points, consume and exploit the narrative of the doomed trans woman in their way.
via Someone Tell Me That I’ll Live: On Murder, Media, and Being a Trans Woman in 2015 – xoJane.
Constance, you know my thoughts about this topic. This article states them far more eloquently than I do. There is a part of the article speaking about how people who “knew us then” feel as if we have died already…
…in light of the murder of trans-women being an almost ritualized offering of human lives to the bloodthirsty god of patriarchy, it feels so eerie, as if my own loved ones consign me to those fires with forked fingers and muttered incantations invoking protection against the evil (trans) eye…
My deepest sorrow is that my life seems a curse. If I exist as I was, then I am doomed and serving life in a prison invisible and undeclared and I am forever derided because I am depressed or despairing or I am resented because I hated myself…
…and if I exist as I am, then I am resented because I am the cause of death of a man who never was and never could be, except in the thoughts and minds of everyone around me. And all they offer me is the promise that they will give me their illusions and fears to prop me up and costume me and call it liberty, or they will call me Patrick Henry and give me death.
It is my choice they say.
Yes…it is…my choice. And I choose Tikkun.
I choose to live, and let go of all other things I cannot control. And if I die before you wake, then I pray the Lord your soul will take…to the fountains of truth and revelation…and then I pray that He will take you across that river you so proudly declared you would never cross…I pray that He will ferry you across Himself, and show you the blood-soaked ground that constitutes the banks of the river called Rejection.
The men became enraged once they discovered that Nettles was transgender, according to prosecutors and a fight broke out.
Dixon punched Nettles in the face, making her to fall to the ground and strike her head on the sidewalk, causing a serious brain injury, said Assistant District Attorney Nicholas Viorst.
Viorst alleges that Dixon brutally beat Nettles and “struck her repeatedly as she lay on the ground” while “driving the side of her head into the pavement.”
The indictment charges that Dixon used the sidewalk as a “dangerous instrument” to cause Nettles’ death.
Constance…why? Driving face into sidewalk…enraged at a gender orientation…punishment of a capital nature for the crime of…what?
Being “a dude in a dress”? Being a “he/she?”
…and I am the one who has been judged as demonized…
*tears*
We start this life with such bright expectation,
each sunrise morn of discovery and
each eventide of hope, our lifetime passes
and time flows like tides constantly in waves
that wash in over us, the same and ceaseless
yet we, in ever-new anticipation
that this new day is diff’rent, something yet
to be discovered in the shell-pink dawn,
we lift our hearts up cheery with bright song.
But there are ashes from the desperate fires
that we assemble in the long sloe nights
so cold upon those yawning yearning shores,
when stars hide behind black clouds of unknowing
and oceans hide in mists of dank despair,
and we are forced to burn all our Hosannas,
those palms fronds of our hopes so optimistic
waved innocent and arrogant and prideful
because we hadn’t seen the moon’s dark side.
We built frail fires from those brittle branches
and clutched at weak warmth, bathed in dim wan light
and marked ourselves with those imposéd ashes
and mourned those days we sang triumphantly
unknowing of the coming loss of all
our innocence in suffering…
and sorrowing…
and death and…
Ashes…ashes…
we all fall down…
and we are mindful of our common crown,
our destiny of dust wreathed round our foreheads,
that destiny of dust around our hearts,
that destiny of dust from which we came
and thus departed
that destiny of dust and our return…
to dust returned,
from dust departed, dust returned,
from dust departed, dust returned,
from dust departed, dust returned,
from dust departed, dust returned,
dust returned…
And it is only at this place, in ashes
after our hopes and dreams have burned to ash
and we have lost our hope and optimism
that we can finally see that stony path
and squinting, see the bloody foot-print outlines
left by the One who goes before our hearts,
the One who walks the Via Dolorosa
the One who, living, there lays down His Life,
the One who shows the way of self-denial
the way of sacrifice, relinquishment
entirely unnatural, the opposite
of every longing of our liquid hearts
that wants to feast upon self-preservation
and turn from bitter cups of self-denial…
And we must choose the place that we will walk:
the ceaseless shores of our naked ambition
and never finding ending place, or home?
Or…walk the path of ashes with this Shepherd
and lose our lives completely to His care
and thus spring from the ashes like a phoenix
leaps from the golden flames to live anew!
See, ashes are the opposite of owning
the mirror image of self-preservation,
the sign-post of the way of life He offers,
the insignia of the lifestyle that He models,
the mark He makes forever on His own
writ large in His own blood mixed with the ashes
of hopes consumed and dreams become dry dust!
This is the downward journey to the highest place victorious,
the deeps of Sabbath Rest and Victory Won.
Regardless of the gods you say you follow,
we all share in a common destiny:
“From dust you’ve come, to dust you shall return”.
Like Him, we too shall die, Life’s pressing question
becomes…how shall we live? How shall our lives
this day respond to death’s reality,
and answer to Life’s strident invitation
to leave all of our privilege and status,
and turn from lives marked for success and promise,
and turn from some potential undefined,
and turn from false things that we think are true,
and let go of wealth, power and consumption,
and deny that false god: accomplishment
and dare to love our enemies with candor
and dare embrace the heady risk of peace
without one stray thought of self-preservation,
take courage to live for the sake of others
and for the sake of Him who shows this way,
the way thru death, the way of blood and ashes,
will we walk in valiant hope in dust and ashes?
We can sing our songs
of life in dust and ashes
and thus return to God
our dust redeemed.
3 Reasons Why Saying ‘Real Men Don’t Rape’ Reinforces Rape Culture — Everyday Feminism.
This is must reading. It gets to a very dangerous assumption: that only monsters or freaks commit rape.
Sadly, rape is committed by loving fathers, normal husbands, common brothers…in short, by ordinary non-monster men who think it is their right to take what they want sexually from these other-gendered objects created merely for a man’s use and pleasure.
This message underlies major sections of some theological beliefs and it is based on a complete misunderstanding of the true nature and essence of who woman is…
…this attitude is inculcated at every turn in our culture today, and sadly women internalize much of this within themselves and end up being vulnerable in ways they would not otherwise wish to be.
I like how the author lays out the issue…head over and check it out, yeah?
North Carolina mom believes bullying led to transgender teen’s suicide – LGBTQ Nation.
Constance…ears are deaf to our pleas…another one has gone over the precipice of despair.
This area is the same one where some of my own dementors hail from, those truly baffling souls so full of hate that they are compelled to speak spite and make sure that they attempt to infuse my heart with that poison…oh yeah, cus they love me so much.
I am deeply saddened but not one bit surprised that this poor dear despaired in such a caustic and hateful atmosphere as this.
Ima keep on posting these things…you cannot pretend it doesn’t happen. You cannot pretend that reading here is the same as supporting a transgender person. If you read here but do nothing, you are like the rich person who walks the streets in -20 degrees below zero and tells the ones who freeze in their nakedness “be warm, be warm.”
Listen: it is not going to stop until you get you up out of your ease and privilege and stand with me! With us! In your community…and yeah, you will lose face and reputation and may be called a name or two…quel horreur!
Do Justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly.
Charissa Grace
http://www.wsoctv.com/videos/news/mother-believes-bullying-led-to-transgender-teens/vDH8L9/
Speaking for us,
making a way
for those of us
shattered by abuse
and raped by men…
defending the powerless,
which is (unfortunately)
most all of us (even men)
in this paradigm
of patriarchy and privilege
It is far,
far deeper
and more complex
than anyone
lets on or is allowed
to show…
I could be wrong…
I could be vapid as vapor…
(or wapid as waper, you wascally wabbit!)
but my heart tattoos say otherwise
they are more Lara Croft than Lana Turner.
Messy houses filled with secret staircases
leading neither up nor down and built of starved excuses
stellar and extending to the past and to the future
as a hedge to make secure our souls against their cold inflation.
Idols stand resplendent in their regal good deed rags
atop secure safe mantels stolid, still
in false security within these homes of disarray
and all the forlorn deeds of our own self-besotted hands.
No corner is untouched or deemed untouchable,
no conclusion inescapable, for we did soon discover,
no–we were shown–these messes low and broken,
jangly jagged in the pieces of our ruined hostile hovels.
This is that tableau displayed of our lost searéd conscience,
disembodied, floating room to room and deeply mourning
what’s been lost, and worse, abandoned
in the losing of idealism’s living throbbing shine.
And our hearts, once lifted up and strong
are finally unadorned and brought down low,
so broken, so contrite and finally open to this Living Invitation
to be drawn at last into a bigger Story…
to be remade and molded, gripped and filled, to be enfolded
in the new creation by a Mercy Stark and so unyielding,
by a Love Severe and so unwieldy in our messy rooms
and serial sin-stained walls and monstrous ways of utter horror.
It takes a broken body and it takes a different stain,
one indelible and permanent, scarlet red and bloody glowing
in the darkness of our tragedy’s pretentious phony triumph…
see the Hand that rips our masks away to make us whole again!
Eat and drink, remember! Then forget the past and rest within those ruins
at last cleansed and emptied of their wreck, delivered of the dreck
and durm und strang of fallen souls, set free of weights unbearable,
interminable, mighty, proud and fell and flawed and haughty.
And then, look…out there, thru yon window broken, there!
Behind that dingy jagged pane of brittle separation,
see the Cross so Stark, transcendent, final ever resting place
of all our sin and wrong, and also Final ever new beginning
of this race, we human butterflies set free from chrysalises left behind,
discarded casually forever…yet never left for death to feed upon or to devour,
for they will someday be raised again
to catch up with us and to be made one again…
to be made whole…
again…at last…again…
amen, again…
amen.
after you’re dead, there’s a funeral, red.
i discovered this recently, except i wasn’t
invited to show up, new, old or otherwise.
in my place was piled up wood, grey,
and lotsa brush all crackly-brown,
a stand-offish, prickly thorny-crown.
they set that half-truth fire blazing and incendiary,
mis-remembers and other (missings) hidden inside
curses, excuses, judgements of indigo echoing depth.
they thought me bound and captive but epithets
were synonymous with white-washed choices made-unmade,
were effigies hanging in flames, in smoke, in spirits.
then that noose just snikked up tight around their heart
like a golden curtain drawn but never rising on a play
written and rehearsed but never actually performed.
just as that funeral, red, was really never
held for me, but just that phantom never-was,
that effigy.
Constance…did you realize this?
I invite you to consider this request.
Being called he/she, and having it justified by a spiritual comment, well it smacks a bit of feeling like getting groomed for other, deeper transgressions.
It is a true reality that I could get murdered, just for walking transgender.
As long as you cis people read and feel all bad and stuff, and then see what’s on tv, we will keep being killed. No one will stop killing us until they are forced to stop…a bit like the police force and their wanton slaughter of young black men.
Please…we really are not doing anything to you. Just let us live.
because
it might make him look
like…what?
like the man with loaded gun
and empty heart
and heartless soul
who blasted her
out of her shoes
and into her grave?
like the man who
bashed her face
to bloody mush
and flicked his bic
and burned the pile
of gender trash
transgressive?
the lost control excuse
the panic and murder alibi
these abusive rampages
verbal, physical, psychic
feel justified to them,
morally acceptable, defensible,
any reason good enough.
Any reason good enough
lost control…
they conflate the two
and we continue
to die like flies.
Fifty Shades of Grey review by Rosie Waterland.
Constance, this is an important review. It pulls the funhouse mirror mask off of one of the most deceptive, disturbing, despicable pieces of pop culture phenomena that has washed up on the shores of our collective zeitgeist in quite some time.
I want to warn those with more sensitive reactions to harsh language that there is a liberal sprinkling of swearing and scatalogical vocabulary, but I think it is appropriate to the force of the emotion this writer is expressing.
It also helped me know why I had that huge shudder and check in my heart over this whole thing, and as I have said earlier I did know about this way back when it was a serialized fan fiction story placed in forums.
The issue is not the sexuality.
The issue is not whether anyone is “openminded” or “a prude” if they approve or disapprove of the production. As I have laid out in 2 posts, I look at sexuality markedly different than seems to be the majority view, but then again I look at most things a bit different anyway.
No…the issue is that this piece of unbridled domestic violence is able to take its place in the hearts of so many millions of people as something to aspire to, something that a truly whole and balanced woman should be able to deal with…
…and it is that lie that I have always been revolted by, felt my spirit buck and shy away from.
It is tragic that Domestic Violence has even the smokescreen of legitimacy that it can hide behind, tuck in and draft off of…until it is back inside the 4 walls of some isolated domicile where the mask comes off and the monster comes out to feed.
Give this review a read, Constance…and then have the courage to know that somethings are just not necessary to accept just because they exist.
Domestic violence is never okay, even if it is wrapped in the promise of pleasure. It is still a box of pain and sorrow.
*(Due to circumstances beyond my control, I was not able to post this yesterday. Better late than never!)*
“Sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.
‘the victims should be treated with compassion’
Word Origin
C14:
from Old French
from Late Latin compassiō fellow feeling,
from compatī to suffer with,
from Latin com- with + patī to bear, suffer”
Compassion. You hear a lot about it. It is an attractive word emotionally, these days. It is a feel-good word, one that evokes feelings of admiration in the one who attributes it to someone, and a sense of pride and accomplishment in the one to whom it is attributed.
It’s sorta like a modern feel good girl-scout merit badge…wait, did Charissa just say that? Now that is not a compassionate thing to say!!
Unless it is, because it serves to deliver from a greater pain in the future.
Here is the troubling thing to me, as we are seeking to unpack this word and let it take on form and substance, as we seek to bring about “the Incarnation of Compassion”. We have far too often stopped at the first part of the definition of the word, and have utterly disregarded the origin of it…that part that talks about “suffering with”, or “bearing suffering with”.
Compassion is not about the one who has it. It is about the one for whom the feeling is born.
And too much compassion is a dangerous thing, because it gets in its own way.
After all, if you actually see your neighbor down the street, are moved to compassion, let the word become Incarnate within you, then you will take action and your time and energy will be consumed to the extent that your ability to have actual compassion (complete with action) will be severely curtailed commensurate with what you expend in this action.
I want to write, in the midst of this sparkling wonder of a snowstorm of exquisite flakes of compassion, to remind us that compassion is about someone other than the haver of it! The mere presence of the feelings commonly called compassion are actually closer to “pity” unless we do something about those feelings.
And that is why I have titled this post “The Evil of Too Much Compassion”…it becomes a little blue pill that we swallow to assuage the pain that comes when we feel compassion and then take no action. The alternative action is to simply read about more heart breaking things and feel more compassion, and then to read about more and feel more, and more, and…
…well, finally, we have become so compassionate that we are creating and attending “compassion rallies” and we are so stirred up about all the things we do that show how compassionate we are that we become very adept at dodging the homeless people laying in the streets and wrapped in rags and cold.
We are Houdinis of news aggregation. We are becoming so broadminded, so large hearted, that we think that rights and privileges should be shared freely…to people of all sexual and gender orientation…and then we read of the murder of the seventh transgender woman this year.
Yes…in the first seven weeks of 2015, seven transgender women have been murdered…and these murders are scattered about the nation, they have nothing else in common save for the gender orientation of the women…and we feel…what?
Compassion? Really? Did we feel moved to the point that we chose to “bear suffering with?” What form did your action take, when you read of that horror? 
Look, the fact is that if you remove the “trans” part and look at this string of murders in the way that most murders are viewed, it would seem the work of a very scary, very mobile serial killer who strikes with no rhyme or reason and could kill you next. There would be an outrage and our police force would stir itself in paroxysms of action to hunt down and stop a monster who would kill women at the rate of one a week…sort of a twisted demented “communion supper” offered to death and defilement!
But no…it is not done that way, because compassion for a transgender woman who is killed is not quite the appropriate emotion, because she may have been out late, or at a bar, or she may not have told the murderer yet that she was trans, or she may have told him she was trans and thus deserved to be murdered, or she may have been interested in sexual activity with an attractive partner or she may have refused sexual activity or…
…well, she is transgender for god’s sake, surely she must have known she shouldn’t just walk around trans and not hide it (or is it tell about it and broadcast so as not to “deceive”, or is it try harder to pass, or is it that she tried too hard and thus looked like a parody of a “real woman”, or…or…ad infinitum).
We get very good at letting our eyes skim over the words in today’s latest story of woe to suck out the juice to slake our thirst to feel good about ourselves…and then not take action lest we limit ourselves in our hunt for more to feel compassionate about.
If compassion is not more than a feeling, then it is not compassion at all.
It is pride.
This day of compassion may or may not be that…it is up to you.
Mother Teresa once said something about this sort of thing. She was in the gutter with a leper who had fouled herself with the loss of bowel control, and she was besmirched in the woman’s filth. A passerby who was well off stopped and rebuked her, asking her what possible difference she was making in the world.
“Look around you!” he exclaimed. “There are millions and billions of people suffering at this very second! Your life here is wasted and your efforts are in vain!”
Mother Teresa looked up calmly at the man, and then she said this:
“I am not called to serve millions and billions…I am called to serve this one.” She turned back to her little lamb, to tend her in her suffering, and the man walked away stunned, baffled.
But never fear, Constance…because he was very very sad about all the millions and billions of people who are suffering in this world…very sad indeed.
And he simply didn’t know how he would be able to go on with this burden, so he prayed that his already expansive “compassionate” heart would be stretched and expanded even further so he could feel that feeling…
…the one that proved what a fine fellow he truly was.
Highways…byways…lost lambs…get you there and let your feelings of pity be transformed in the crucible of suffering into true gold compassion.
Do Justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly…live compassionately.
Charissa Grace.
Constance…
Due to harsh circumstances both in my own life and in the life of my truest friend, I have been thinking a lot about death…
…what is death?
Is death the loss of animation, the exit of that ineffable spark undefinable? Is it the fleeing of warmth and movement?
Or is it something more, something deeper and more final, more tragic and fatal?
Back up, waaaay back to when I was around 25 years old and torn asunder from myself and tromping all over me with the jackboots of performance and despair…at that time I considered that the days I had on this earth were a prison sentence that I had to serve before I was finally released through death and reunited with God.
I was living to die.
And in a very real and primal sense, I was already dead and just didn’t have the good grace to realize it and lay down somewhere.
But now? Oh Constance, these days I endure “death” in so many ways…but it is in my deepest desire to live at last, so I am dying to live. I have “died” in the workplace. I have died to ever being able to go back and get a do-over.
And I have “died” to people…this is what grieves me most deeply as it is now that I am finally and fully alive and awake!
So I ask you: does the declaration of others make me dead? People who have not talked to me in forever? People who resent me because in their hearts, I Charissa have killed their friend, their relative…
And yet they refuse to really know me, to taste my life and see that the Lord is good, good to me and thru me…
When someone doesn’t care deeply enough to experience my life, why are they so driven to declare me dead?
Honestly, it feels to me like they are the ones who are dead…they are dead to their responsibilities to the living. They are dead in their hearts which should be tender and lively and rejoicing in good…at least it feels like that.
My very best dearest friend is facing death right now, stark and real. Not some romanticised falsely tragic vision of death placed in service of a world view that is dedicated to self, but real, ugly, stinky, terrifying death carrying with it all of the ultimate and final separation that is the true horror called death.
I am sure she would get my heart cry: dying to live rather than living to die.
I am thinking of her, as I was struggling with these ideas, and sending her all my love, and every single molecule of life I can channel from the Life Giver Themself!
Bad news swirls stark,
cold leaves on carny winds
and in this rising tide
I fear the ship is sinking.
I am choking on those
gall-soaked fingers of despair
jammed down my raw wracked throat
while I wretch and wrench
and heave to summon optimism,
that phantom failed-familiar. 
I do all I can to bail the rising water,
even as I wrestle against fear and anxiety.
It’s in these times that sadness overwhelms me
in a blurry growing storm of weary longing,
a tragic tide of lonely isolation
sweeping deep over me, drowning me!
I have befriended long lament
and I take comfort in loud cries
and blasting mourning echoes throughout time
and history in crying, captured true in poems, songs
and statements of lament, a dolor
that submerges hope and quenches dreams.
I groan in deepest cries of agony, of anger and confusion,
of disorientation, of sorrow, grief, and protest
that linger as mere echoes of a long ago lamenter of every human loss:
“Harvest is past, summer is ended, and we are not saved.
For the brokenness of the daughter of my people
I am broken; I mourn, dismay has taken hold of me.
Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then has not the health of the daughter of my people been restored?” 
But now I face realities that feel completely overwhelming:
illness, death and loss and being ever on the losing end of things
and that through no fault of my own but always in last place or left behind.
My cry of pain is this:
my deepest acknowledgment I am still not home,
here divided from my body and my own deepest desires
found in my dearest relationships.
I am separated and long for utter restoration
in this overwhelming sorrow…
I find myself within this crucible of transformation
and discover that the waters of despair that seek to drown
and overwhelm can become waters of
glad cleansing and repair.
lament may yet have
its own way of transformation.
“For if the Lord causes grief, then They will have compassion according to Their abundant lovingkindness.”
crucifixion singing in the center
giving voice to what is broken
in this dark and dying world
and Shining
one song inextinguishable
paradoxical, inexplicable,
surging somehow inside life and death
and Shining
it galvanizes all things, transforms everything,
it plays, this lone hymn hanging
of the Hangman Finally Hung
and Shining
in dissonance, resolve,
tension and release
inexplicable black tragic tenor notes
unexplainable red suffering,
scrawling over bass drone
deep and purple-bruised
by perplexing dark despair
and I stare…I stare…I stare…
in mute horror mixed with wonder
and the jarring jangly notes
swirl and slash, they cut and caper
around that Body Broken
and Shining
the dissonant nightmare score
is writ there on His face
is writ there on His back
is writ there on His head
is writ there on His hands and feet
is writ there in grace notes
is writ there bloody, permanent.
is writ there permanent
and shining.
Landscape of Disruption and thick Decadence
washing ever over me in those thin emerald waves
teal and deep blue, muddy yellow and tan.
Your streets of light and music,
aimless, drifting bacchanalia bright and colorful
snaking through the throngs teaming
and strong smell of no limits but your streets
of cluttered trash and timorous times and eyes looking
pleading pits of hopeless wincing and no pity present,
just despair metastasizing monstrous and insidious
You never knew me. You looked at my surface
you thought me shallow and giddy.
You missed that shredding heart tested. Yes! I said it!
Tested in your dismissive glance.
Well, my glance is not shallow or naive,
my heart is shrewd and assessing and my eyes are clear and courageous
in the maelstrom of fear and fascination as I walk your streets…
and they walk me as well
streets of flowers and perfume, streets of plenty piled perfect,
exquisite in their rich opulent promises
and other streets too, decorated
with tarp-roofed hovels masquerading as houses
and sex-crazed humans masquerading as homes
and lost souls writhing in streets with no roof at all.
And you distrusted me!
You called me threatening and treacherous,
and your gimlet eye wide and white
glinting with ignorance and fear
but really just too damn lazy to make the effort
to climb inside this sleek white skin God borned me in,
this suburban Illinois pelt from streets
with singular but uniformly similar looking
roofed houses, with more than enough food, clothing,
and resources to meet needs and wants…
no. You never looked deeper.
You never gave me a second glance.
Oh Brazil, I never had a freaking chance!
You are too comfortable in your schizophrenic status quo
to see me, different on the inside than I am on the outside,
too confident you are one and known…
to yourself and others…
keep telling yourself that comforting untruth.
but you are just like me
and you don’t even know it!
You never knew it.
Will you ever?
Know it?
You with your rivers merry and feeding your heartland
and used for all things at once?
bathing…defecating…washing…drinking…
(and I am the polluted one?)
You with your monkeys quick and mischievous
and your giant wads of sloth hung lazy in the lush trees
verdant and slow…unaware, unaffected, unbothered…
You…pet monkeys and parrots in the midst of poverty and pleasures
and the never ending search for food or other treasure
in dirt and filth, in gold and glitter.
Oh Brazil! You never knew me!
You never tasted the blood I gave you
in laughter and singing and abounding smiles,
in unspeakable desolation and despair,
shriven of hope for a moment and too close to the cold…
I bled while you merely blinked blankly.
Well, I survived, no thanks to you.
I moved on before you could fall from trees
or sneak in windows or bite my soft arms
with hard beaks and bright feathers.
Oh, you left your forever marks
but I am still myself within my pulsing heart,
I am still and always will be red…
red red RED against the backdrop of your
splashy showy palette…and you so puzzled in my singularity.
Well I like it, red…I like me! And I walk on
my head held high and face into the wind
and I am unencumbered by your war and free
but alas for you, Brazil, alas!
Though I know you, you never knew me.
Van Nuys transgender woman stabbed to death then set on fire | Planet Transgender.
Constance…nice to see that the perp got the obligatory “setting the corpse on fire” piece correct…right??
Sigh…always the post mortem mayhem and mutilation.
What does say about the strength of gender orientation?
(And no, Hater…the answer is NOT “the bitch had it coming”)
Well, at least we can all console ourselves with the knowledge that our Transgender Remembrance Day is gonna be soo great for all of us who live, and we will have plenty to preen about and feel ever so sad over as we break our arms patting ourselves on the back for how progressive we are because we cry and remember the dead ones.
Oh, but we must be oh so careful to never actually do anything about this ongoing murder spree lest we make the need for Transgender Remembrance Day disappear…can’t have that, now, can we!!? I mean, actually do something?? *Shudder*
Yes, Constance, you did a remarkable job in detecting my extreme sarcasm…get the point, and then get to work. This will not change until cis-gender people with privilege speak up and use their power on our behalf.
Grim Charissa
Police search for clues in murder of transgender woman in Texas – LGBTQ Nation.
Constance, I am sure you already know about this crime, and so my posting it here is redunda…oh wait…of course you haven’t heard about it yet!
It is just a “so-called transgender woman”…poor thing just got what she deserved.
Nope…nothing wrong here. Move along, move along.
Obviously, I was writing sarcastically to expose the reality of the underlying assumptions that empower the continued lack of it being any sort of an agenda item to protect the rights and well-being of transgender people.
And the count rolls on…good thing we have a transgender remembrance day so her death will not be in vain, right? She can now serve as a lil tidbit for the cis-gender world to consume as an assuagement of conscience! A lil “transgender tums” to relieve the indigestion caused by the wanton devouring of transgender people.
Do JUSTICE
Love MERCY
Walk HUMBLY
“Make sure you tell the people you love that you love them.
Loudly and often. You never know when it might be too late.”
Too late…what is that?
I think that the sentiment behind this statement is one that is commonly grasped, and yet it is not commonly embraced…because if it was, then there wouldn’t be so much casual, callous disregard for one another as human beings.
Our eyes caress these words…while our hearts just glance right off like stones skipping along the surface of a lake…
again……………again…………again………again……again…and sink.
for good.
I think about the situations of my own life…I poured my heart into a group of individuals for over 10 years, and since I openly transitioned, I have had interactions with two of them during which I was told that I was under the influence of a demonic spirit, that I was not “submitted” to other christian people, and that I was rebellious towards God. None of these things are true, but hey, at least there was some conversation there, some acknowledgement of me as a person. And the rest…nothing.
It is as if I never was, as if we never lived, never had those one on one conversations. It is as if I am not the repository of their secrets that I am, as if I had not prayed for them, loved them. No…our connection was based strictly on what it was I could do for them…and that seems surreal to me in light of the sentiment above.
Here is the deal: we read the quotes like the one I quoted and we think “yeah, I gotta be sure I am remembering that it could be too late someday”…and then it is…too late.
Just like that.
I don’t know if there are any people that would think “too late” when I die. I cannot control that. But I do know what I can control: saying I love you to the people I do love and care for…and telling every person I meet that they are important, valuable, and lovely.
Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly.
Charissa
“On a scale of 1 to 10,
how would you rate
your pain today?”
attempts to understand
and manage dirty pain
only cause more
pain (slivers and shards growing like crystals)
that daily dun-brown inquiry
into ourselves seizes us,
the hot buzz sting
of the growing awareness
of mortality….
aggravates deeply (pain)
more than I could say
and redly amplifies
the original stark question.
what if you answer 10
at 3 AM
but by the afternoon…
what then?
what of the futile measurement?
what of the meaningless guess
and what of the meaning-haunted guesser?
adding mortal insult
to immortal injury (pain).
Morality whispers of a wrongness
to pain
but I have wondered why
we think pain recognizes morality.
That’s the real question, innit?
Why we think there are
floors and ceilings
in the house of pain.
So in the hard and hopeless
of the darkness before dawn
we sit between these moments
when all things are defined
and that infernal scale
is shattered by the triumph
of pain held to the standard
at last made manifest
revealed first on a cross
and then revealed
set free
of scales, of measurements,
of guesses in the night, while
golgotha gasps and grasps
futilely at our cloaks
that we have shed as winter
surrenders to Sweet Spring.
That Spring
That 1 and 10
Ever Spring.
Why did David Reimer commit suicide?.
Dear Constance:
Okay, so you wanna know what it is like to be transgender? Well…read the article at the link above. It is the story of a natal male who was horribly maimed during circumcision and was then subjected to a further mutilation of his body to “change him into a girl”. The theory was that gender identity was purely a matter of external plumbing, and that if this little person “woke up” and saw their external plumbing was female, and that their clothes were female and their name was female and they were treated as female by everyone else, well they would just “be female”, case closed and everyone lives happily ever after.
Except it was an illusion. A tragic and horrible illusion. And it ended in suicide after 38 years of horror and suffering. The article explains that all very well.
So how does it relate to a transgender person? It goes to the location and seat of gender identity! Under the current paradigm of the binary gender orientation, I am defined by my external plumbing. From birth, I have been named, dressed, treated and socialized in the role consistent with my external genetalia, regardless of how I feel, think, or see the world which is totally the opposite…and this contradiction results in the same sorts of feelings and reactions as this poor soul in the article. Oh, I processed things a bit different, but as I read of his despair, well it was too close to home.
Imagine for a moment: if you woke up tomorrow, and all your clothes were the other gender…everyone you knew called you by a name that felt like sand in your own mouth and heart…you were expected to excel in the roles assigned by the opposite gender…you were expected to “know” the things the opposite gender has as inherent to them…
Maybe even at first you would think “cool”, what a chance to see the other side! (Disregard the fact that you have prior experience already “seeing” your correct and natural side and would carry that experience with you as a help and buffer…we transgender people don’t even have that much).
But eventually, you would tire of this…enough, you would think. I am going back to my real self, laying all this crap aside.
Oh but wait! Everyone everywhere and every arm of society is now poised against you like the bramble bushes that were against Prince Charming as he sought to set Sleeping Beauty free! It is all one giant Mirkwood filled with Shelobs and worse! You show up to work wearing your right clothes and get mocked, threatened and terminated.
I think you get my point.
Gender is not located in external plumbing, and when your internal sense of gender and your external manifestation of this don’t line up the conflict is cataclysmic!
But the reverse is also true! When a person’s body is surgically attended to with skill and care, and brought into alignment with the internal sense of gender, why voila! The conflict dramatically diminishes and even disappears…and normal life happiness results.
We have always been taught not to judge a book by its cover. We are taught that it is not outward appearance that impresses God, for They regard the heart and assess that. So why in the world do we insist on imposing gender standards from the outside in, rather than discovering who our family and friends are from the inside out?
Listen: being transgender is not a mental illness. It is not a demonic spirit, any more than epilepsy is either of those…or a cleft palate is either of those…or a leaky heart valve is either of those.
Being transgender is a state of being, one that has been a part of the human experience of gender as far back as historical records extend, and it is across all cultures and races…it is something that is a function of the core of some people’s lives…
BUT: if this condition is left untreated, then that neglect can result in horrible consequences: addictions, depressions, emotional and spiritual despairs, and ultimately the overwhelming desire to not hurt anymore, suicide.
But no…for some reason that completely mystifies me, we think that transgender humans are “adopting a lifestyle” or “adopting a new sexual proclivity” or are “seeking to overthrow marriage” or “rebelling against God”, or “are freaks” or…or…or…
It never ends, those “or”s.
If you are an ally, thank you, and please continue to support with your time, talent and treasure until these lies are shattered and a whole beautiful segment of humanity is liberated.
But if you aren’t…if you are “neutral” or simply new or think it is blechy…well just imagine if you were forced…yeah. Not good.
I am a letter, and the envelope I am in has changed…a lot. But I am still the same letter I always was…and if you have courage, maybe I will let you read me! 🙂
Do Justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly.
Charissa
i saw her there, in the dark woods,
so fair of movement, fair of face
she walked beneath the milky moon
and bathed in silken light like lace.
she glowed with beauty’s blessing kist
upon her brow, but knew it not
for hatred choked her slender throat
and in its death grip she was caught.
i ran to her, and called her name
my voice it was a whippoorwill
my voice a falcon stark and shrill
i called her name in terror-trill
but she could not hear me approach
her, buried under long reproach
so cut off from a future hope
and bound by hate’s black biting rope
so I just stood beside her there
just her and me, her broken stare
and dirges echoed through the night
and she in tragic silken light…
and then she ran straight to the moon
it rushed at us! alas, i swooned
upon the snowy cold fields fair
and when i woke, she was not there 
i asked the owls and talked to trees
and heard the moon had stooped so near
had come down to grant her release
from stony hearts and hatred’s sneer…
so now i haunt those woods, those vales
and listen hard inside the night
in case a singer runs for me
as i to her ran desperately
but silence croons so clear and cold,
the lonely moon is wreathed in gold
so distant, never drawing near
to where we stood in silken tears.
I am a childe of dark, a childe of light.
I was born beneath the shining moon
but just outside it’s golden touch
there, on dim green meadows blanketing
the warm red earth in comfort midst the singing dark and stars.
I was born upon the stones that radiate residual heat
as they remember blazing suns so brilliant beneath that blue sky
that blankets those same meadows green and glorious in the day
but now those stones lay bare in the cold night, as I am bare as well, uncovered.
I was born in darkness, and outside
looking in upon the singing stars
hung in night sky velvet-soft and sable
surrounded by splendors from some lost fable.
Outside.
I was born outside the secret knowledge that every other person seems to have
of just how goddam dull and ordinary everything around them “really is”. I mean
just look at them, shining so brilliant each day and acting like it’s only night! I see
their flaming hearts a-fire and blazing but they just trudge by feeling bored, uptight.
I watch events unfold and want to sing in joy and caper!
But when I open up my heart and shout and point in wonder…
well, those fish eyes turn and stare and those mouths gape and mock, hung open
and I am named too much, inglorious and out of order…out of order…out of order.
Childe dwelling in the swelling dark of gloomy bored indifference
Childe dwelling midst the dazzle vast and glory of a day
(just One Day that unfolds brand new
over and over and over and over and over
Full, expressed complete miraculous
in every single same lily white
in every single same bird flight
in every single whispering wind
that echoes ever over the same ever different waters bright)
I am a companion with no company to keep because I’m
elated and afraid,
curious and fearful,
confused and wide awake
and seeing all around me
the marvels that they fail to see
(or rather, what they see and call the same?
the same ole same ole same ole same ole same
and let the repetition rob them of the vision
and leave them drunk and sober but
out of proper phase for when intoxication
is called for in this moment and when sobriety is come
to sing us back at last to proper sanity).
And on the cusp of Dark and Light I’m homeless in the day, the night,
homeless and repudiating that blank stupor of disinterest
that surrounds me…tries to drown me, pull me in it’s vicious grip
and trap me in its undertow of
violence unfolding
suffering repeated
oppression and injustice
become mere background noise
to serenade those bored yawns
and sighs of such indifference
that boredom has become
a way of life.
Out of phase (childe of dark)
and out of synch (childe of glad day)
delighting in monotony…
another walk beneath beauty…
another page before I sleep…
do it again! do it again, God!
another minute sharing hearts
because our moment is delight
alas…this childe born but belonging
not to day and not to night.
Constance…this appeared on my Facebook feed…I am distraught.
***********************************************************************************
Leelah was a 17yo #trans girl who just committed suicide. Rejected by her Christian parents. Put through reparative therapy. Her suicide note is below.
(Yes, it’s a verified real story. This post is from the City Councilman. Leelah is misgendered in news reports and images say “beloved son.” Love your kids, no matter who they are.)
Some very sad news to share.
Yesterday, a 17-year old committed suicide by jumping in front of a semi on I-71 near the South Lebanon exit.
It has come to light that this person likely committed suicide because she was transgender.
While Cincinnati led the country this past year as the first city in the mid-west to include transgender inclusive health benefits and we have included gender identity or expression as a protected class for many years….the truth is….it is still extremely difficult to be a transgender young person in this country.
We have to do better.
By reading her letter, Leelah makes it clear she wants her death to, in some way, help “trans civil rights movements.”
Please join me in making a donation (investment in our trans kids) right now to TransOhio.
Invest by clicking here: http://www.transohio.org
SUICIDE NOTE
If you are reading this, it means that I have committed suicide and obviously failed to delete this post from my queue.
Please don’t be sad, it’s for the better. The life I would’ve lived isn’t worth living in… because I’m transgender. I could go into detail explaining why I feel that way, but this note is probably going to be lengthy enough as it is. To put it simply, I feel like a girl trapped in a boy’s body, and I’ve felt that way ever since I was 4. I never knew there was a word for that feeling, nor was it possible for a boy to become a girl, so I never told anyone and I just continued to do traditionally “boyish” things to try to fit in.
When I was 14, I learned what transgender meant and cried of happiness. After 10 years of confusion I finally understood who I was. I immediately told my mom, and she reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl, that God doesn’t make mistakes, that I am wrong. If you are reading this, parents, please don’t tell this to your kids. Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don’t ever say that to someone, especially your kid. That won’t do anything but make them hate them self. That’s exactly what it did to me.
My mom started taking me to a therapist, but would only take me to christian therapists, (who were all very biased) so I never actually got the therapy I needed to cure me of my depression. I only got more christians telling me that I was selfish and wrong and that I should look to God for help.
When I was 16 I realized that my parents would never come around, and that I would have to wait until I was 18 to start any sort of transitioning treatment, which absolutely broke my heart. The longer you wait, the harder it is to transition. I felt hopeless, that I was just going to look like a man in drag for the rest of my life. On my 16th birthday, when I didn’t receive consent from my parents to start transitioning, I cried myself to sleep.
I formed a sort of a “fuck you” attitude towards my parents and came out as gay at school, thinking that maybe if I eased into coming out as trans it would be less of a shock. Although the reaction from my friends was positive, my parents were pissed. They felt like I was attacking their image, and that I was an embarrassment to them. They wanted me to be their perfect little straight christian boy, and that’s obviously not what I wanted.
So they took me out of public school, took away my laptop and phone, and forbid me of getting on any sort of social media, completely isolating me from my friends. This was probably the part of my life when I was the most depressed, and I’m surprised I didn’t kill myself. I was completely alone for 5 months. No friends, no support, no love. Just my parent’s disappointment and the cruelty of loneliness.
At the end of the school year, my parents finally came around and gave me my phone and let me back on social media. I was excited, I finally had my friends back. They were extremely excited to see me and talk to me, but only at first. Eventually they realized they didn’t actually give a shit about me, and I felt even lonelier than I did before. The only friends I thought I had only liked me because they saw me five times a week.
After a summer of having almost no friends plus the weight of having to think about college, save money for moving out, keep my grades up, go to church each week and feel like shit because everyone there is against everything I live for, I have decided I’ve had enough. I’m never going to transition successfully, even when I move out. I’m never going to be happy with the way I look or sound. I’m never going to have enough friends to satisfy me. I’m never going to have enough love to satisfy me. I’m never going to find a man who loves me. I’m never going to be happy. Either I live the rest of my life as a lonely man who wishes he were a woman or I live my life as a lonelier woman who hates herself. There’s no winning. There’s no way out. I’m sad enough already, I don’t need my life to get any worse. People say “it gets better” but that isn’t true in my case. It gets worse. Each day I get worse.
That’s the gist of it, that’s why I feel like killing myself. Sorry if that’s not a good enough reason for you, it’s good enough for me. As for my will, I want 100% of the things that I legally own to be sold and the money (plus my money in the bank) to be given to trans civil rights movements and support groups, I don’t give a shit which one. The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say “that’s fucked up” and fix it. Fix society. Please.
Goodbye,
(Leelah) Josh Alcorn
For Part TWO, click HERE
***** ***** ***** ***** *****
The kings stayed with us three days, and I was determined to accompany them despite being in no condition to make such an arduous journey. We had no idea where we were going, or how far it was. All we had was a new star that the Star King said sang to him to follow until it stopped where the Mighty One was. I would most likely die before I returned and yet…I knew in my heart of hearts that I was destined for such a quest.
And so we set out that fateful morning so long ago. The Star King had a big barrel of frankincense to give to the Mighty One. The Mountain King had a big chest of gold to give to Him. ‘What will you give Him?’ they asked me. I laughed in mirthless despair. What could such as I give to such as Him?
I would most likely be dead before we found Him, but I said, if I was not dead, then I would give Him myself. HA, HA—a joke on the Mighty One—a dead King as a gift. So, I loaded my pack animals with food, water, and a large trunk full of burial spice—myrrh. It would most likely be used on me before we arrived, but if not, then I would complete the joke and give it to the Mighty One in the face of death, as a down payment for his dead King. My subjects lined the roadway and cheered us—some in jest and some in sorrow. Deep inside it was like everyone knew I was not coming back alive.
We traveled for months, following that star, and I grew weaker and weaker, and my dreams more and more terrible. I saw each blow of the whip and heard each gasp from His mouth. I saw each drop of living blood fall, liquid ruby light. I saw each time He was hit. I saw every crystal tear drop, and I saw the hammer fall time and again as it drove the nails through Him and stuck Him to the stake. I saw Him dropped into the earth like a broken sword in the midst of an empty grave. I needed constant care but death like the tide just kept creeping closer and closer.
Finally one night, in the dreams, I held onto the King of Lights as He was drawn down. Deeper and deeper into the teeth of the darkness I was pulled, but still I held on, down into such hell itself. The pressure and sorrow and grief and the undead dark were overwhelming and again, in shame and despair I had to let go and seek the light of the world I knew. But I couldn’t find my way back. I was lost, and in the darkness, I wandered alone. The Star King and the Mountain King thought me dead and left me with all that I brought.
And I lay, I know not how long.
***** ***** ***** ***** *****
For Part TWO, click HERE
I remember
last Christmas,
lingering in my mind
midst memory’s fogs
and memories
…just grey mists now,
swirling and coiling
back on themselves,
roiling forward
from the past
and boiling over
into this morning,
this day…
this time sitting
in the midst of ashes
dead and flat remaining
from that cold conflagration
of becoming thru the fires
of that season.
Friends, job,
name, family,
reputation,
all consumed
by fire,
all revealed as
morsels of the moment
(that lasted 55 years and still just a moment)…
last year,
I had it all
at least in the eyes
of those who don’t matter,
I had it all…especially
the awful yawning
void of nothing
gaping inside
me, most real
inside me,
I remember
the day after Christmas
reduced me to a place
in the hills adjacent
to the place a woman
took her own life
this year,
reduced me
to screaming incoherence
because I had run out
of words to scream and
I had just begun
to scratch the surface
of what there was
to scream about,
that awful
substantial black
nothing.
that day,
it was a close matter
a razor’s edge tumble
into red greedy flames
burning long and low
all year until
they blazed in fury fanned
when smothering shrouds
were snatched away sudden
in torn and tattered strips
to consume the bribes
and chains of nothing
clothed in costumes.
This Christmas,
nothing has been exposed,
revealed as the imposter
it still masquerades as.
I am empty of screams
but full of me and
ready to receive
the Promise of words
to give voice to
what’s unspeakable, unnameable,
to dress that wound
infected with nothing
and salve it with
the scratchy tickle of truth
and set free we
shadowbound to be
our shining selves,
casting shadows
instead of being flat
and cast by them.
It is the season of emptiness, and places
prepared by pain are hungry
for the Presence
and the Promise
that only emptiness contains.
I cannot even begin to speak of how I feel after reading this. Thank yous to Lori for finding her voice to write about what I felt frozen by.
If you read this, and then go on business as usual, you need to realize: there may be someone in your circle of influence who is either bullying or bullied.
Your involvement could make all the difference.
We feel the tragic nature of these sorts of things because someone unique, utterly precious and beyond priceless has been snuffed out. But the same principle holds the other way: you…you yourself are unique, and have a power and a voice that impacts the universe.
But only if you use it. If you don’t, well we all know the black tide that seeks to erode everything and pull it into itself and its seething mass of hurt and horror.
Ronin Shimizu
Like my son, Ronin Shimizu was a young boy living in California. He was a cheerleader, like my son hopes to be one day. Ronin is described as positive and happy, like my son is often described. He endured bullying because he liked something that some people is “only for girls.” Sadly, my son knows exactly how that feels.
Last week, 12-year-old Ronin decided to end the bullying by ending his life.
I worry every day that my son will have this too in common with Ronin. Because the group of kids like Ronin and my son have the highest rate of suicide attempts in the world.
The articles about Ronin’s death report that in the years leading up to his suicide, Ronin’s parents made multiple complaints to his school about the homophobic and gender-based bullying their son was experiencing. The school’s response was inadequate and the bullying…
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My friend Frederic over at Poems & poèmes has written an incredible poem that I simply had to share here with you! For some reason the reblog option is not available, so I am linking to it and also copying it for you below. Please visit over at Frederic’s blog, and keep him in your heart…I know that I have him in my heart everyday, especially when he is “walking the black dog”.
Frederic…hang in there. Regardless of the pain, our enduring and rising up each day is our best resistance against it and those who cause it.
Blessings and Grace,
Charissa
***** ***** *****
Don’t ask
the doe
wolves
bit and killed
to show
compassion
love them all
it’s the same old tune every time
but I fear
they were fully aware
of what they did
and I’m sorry to confess
I do not
love
them
at
all
let me say a little black prayer
o fair Fatality
may
wolves
suffer
agonies!
Gustave Courbet, the Dead Doe – Image source
icicles hung glittering clear,
they shot diamonds, mercury bright
and gleams refracting morning light
they hid the horrid crime that happened
in the cold and dark black night…
how can people do it, say it?
well, last night the deed was done
beneath clouds scuttering wet and rainy
(like my covers wet with tears,)
it will be done again you know,
but only lonely dead will weep
and they are dead…so that leaves just
the children crying in the cold
and hungry violence of the night.
that hand groped blind and deaf, and reached
for icicles hung in the dark,
all light drained dry and swallowed down
fear’s greedy gullet, sucked into
the belly of the raving beast. 
that tongue, fearsome and cleaved in twain
and mute, waggling helplessly
between those fearful gnashing teeth
it fluttered, spit, stuttered and hit
with lies, with bitter accusations
comforting and crooning.
the disembodied hand snapped off
that cold icicle, that one that
the red light of Mars’ distant eye
unblinking, licked, caressed and sharpened,
then the hand floated across
the room so dark and thick with terror,
while some choked disembodied voice
muttered Mene, Mene, Teqel, Upharsin
and I knew I was a wall
and it the hungry writer, and
then it fell in fierce red streaks,
such icy strokes of death tattooing
“unclean!” “beware!” “mind-whore!”
my blood was its gory ink
and my heart was its inkwell, screaming
as it wrote again, again,
it wrote again, til I drained dry,
lay still, eyes glassed and blindly staring
at the black sky spinning, fading
from my view while that night faded
into grey dawn streaked with crimson
bursting full into today.
I woke up and found my face
was wet, and thank god it was just
my tears and not my blood, but wait…
my eyes were caked, dry, rimed with salt
and sleep…the clammy wet was really
that icicle and the secret
kill it keeps inside its melty
hungry heart so ravenous
and never satisfied or sated,
just drunk on my blood and terror,
drunk on me, so feared and hated.
i died last night…but in my dreams,
so there is not a corpse remaining
and the murder weapon melted
(they always do in dreams, you know)
and so the killer walks the earth
so smug and lily pure and knowing
that the sprawling feast is now
secure and safe and once again
the killer sings out
“all is well inside the city!”
walls so high, so white, so white,
just like the cliffs of Dover standing,
leaning hard into that night.
Just Because He Breathes: Learning to Truly Love Our Gay Son | Linda Robertson.
Crying so hard that it took this sacrifice: this child sacrifice in order for
these pitiable people to realize something about God…
He does not ever require us to sacrifice our children to Him, because He has already given Jesus to us who chose to be our sacrifice of love.
Listen…make it really easy: you are not God. Thus, your one and only job here in the earth is to Love Them, Love your neighbor, and be kind. Believe it or not, God really can get thru to people…way better than you can.
And pray that it doesn’t take something like this for you to see clearly.
That last leaf, on that dry branch
scratching at grey skies and digging for rain,
digging in my heart for seeds of grief
buried so deep.
What is it about the last one?
Leaf, apple, pine cone?
Winds rake and tug, greedily scooping prizes
sweet, tart, bristley, floatey…
but there always are those hangers on tenacious,
and never saying die…
or is it that they cannot do it? Say die?
or even “dead”.
Is it that they refuse
to let go? Or is it
that they cannot?
Let go?
And here is the killer: some people think they are resilient
and full of perseverance and persistence,
and some people think they are noble
and full of loyalty and loose liberty.
But I wonder if they are
just not capable, if they are
just crippled by their
inability to let go and move on?
I know how many days have come,
winds blowing, raking and pawing at me lusty,
unwanted doggy beasts, knocking me loose
and then away and disappearing.
I know how many thrusts, rooting have picked me over
and my secrets tumbling dead and colorful in air
away to dirt but I left lonely, hanging unrequited there
and flapping solitary in the winds of shame.
But there are still some (leaves, secrets, treasures)
still hanging on and unable to let go,
adorned in funeral robes dolorous
and hued in autumn splendor.
Most see them as emblems, medals,
battle spoils dearly won and worn…
but they are just proof
of my weaknesses and loss
and inability to quit,
to let go and enter
into that towering
still White transition called
Winter…
which, disguised as death
to frighten all assailants,
holds my dreams and hopes and losses
all in trust and buried deep in wombs
of merciful becoming masquerading
as cold tombs silent, dark and numbing,
Winter…
who holds my heart gripped
in her frosty kiss desperate,
longing for her last gasp
before presenting me
to the sprites of spring and then
the suns of summer.
The last one…there.
map, marking ways
hidden and secret to find
my deepest treasures,
or medal, memory of moments
living and filthy with love
long ago so bold and given over now
to the grave so lonely and cold.
I guess only Winter
really knows and will proclaim
when She calls roll and
the Final Thaw begins.
I never scuba dive.
I’m afraid of those sharks,
great white sharks
(I could never figure out what was so great about them).
I think what they mean
is big white sharks.
and they aren’t even really white!
(why do we call things white that aren’t even?).
Their teeth are white though,
white razors running
from snout to throat and down
(I think they chew their way thru the water).
Besides, I am in enough danger (on land)
from things called great (that aren’t)
from things called white (that are just pale fish belly dead)
from things with teeth (that are hungry for blood).
Constance, here is the sad truth: if I was murdered for being trans, I would be blamed, othered, misgendered in my death, and then forgotten as a sad cautionary tale of someone who went cray-cray…and once again the epidemic of hateful absolutely vile demonic murder would continue unchecked by my death any more than the tsunamis are checked by lil old seawalls along the oceanfront.
It is not a joke. It is not just me being shrill.
It is pure unadulterated evil. Killing someone because they do not conform to societal norms.
The post below is my contribution to Transgender Remembrance Day…the blunt and brutal fact that I am worth about as much to towns, communities and society as the dog crap in the street that needs to be cleaned up and disposed of with laws discussed to control the dogs.
Keep on fiddling, Nero…keep on fiddling. You are sawing your own neck in two.
Excerpted from a larger article:
Posted by Morgan Collado on November 18, 2014 at 7:00am PSTThere’s an interesting phenomenon that I’ve witnessed over the past few years. The names of trans women of color will be in the mouths of the queer community after they’ve been murdered, but support for us while we are still alive is sporadic at best. Trans women are pushed out of queer spaces by cis people, dfab genderqueers, and trans men, just to name a few. Women’s spaces are frequently hostile to us because we aren’t “real women” but trans men almost always get a free pass. And I’ve seen more than one cis queer say that trans women are “appropriating” the gay rights movement, totally ignorant of the fact that we started the damn thing. I have seen more than one cis queer say that we have nothing in common with them, that our issues are completely unrelated. We have a hard time finding dates, finding support, finding community. And when we dare to call people out for their transmisogyny, we are labeled crazy, hysterical, divisive. I have been called Austin “queer scene’s” number one enemy. All for daring to share my thoughts on the world around me.
Trans Day of Remembrance is filled to the brim with the names of murdered Black and brown trans women, but is a single evening of remembering enough? And what does it mean that TDoR doesn’t explicitly talk about race and is often dominated by white people? Here in Austin there’s this tradition of calling the names of the dead and then having an audience member sit in a chair that represents where the dead trans woman would sit. The seats are always filled with white people and non-trans women. What do our deaths mean when our bodies, our lives, the physical space we take up, is appropriated by white folks? How can I mourn for my sisters when the space set up for that mourning is so thoroughly colonized? And how can I even see hope of living a full life when I don’t see myself reflected in what is supposed to be my community?
Don’t get me wrong, it’s important to honor those women who came before us, those women murdered by colonial patriarchy. But it seems like more often than not, the queer community at large is content with just remembering. We only hear about trans women after their deaths. And even our deaths are not our own. A week doesn’t go by without a white queer citing the deaths of trans women of color as the evidence of how oppressed they are. These stats are often used in service of their own assimilation; meanwhile, they’re happy to leave us out in the cold. We don’t even have dignity in death, nor the ability to decide what it will mean for us.
Support for trans women dwindles when we are still alive. Nowhere is this clearer than in fundraisers run by and for trans women. There have been some success stories, but they always seem to be few and far between. More often than not, a trans woman’s fundraiser will get a few signal boosts, maybe a couple of dollars and then languish. Meanwhile, trans men’s fundraisers for transition related care often get fully funded. This funding disparity is also clear institutionally, where organizations that focus on the concerns and issues of trans women of color get a miniscule amount of all the money from LGBTQ foundations. This is especially true in the South, where LGBT organizations only get 3-4% of domestic LGBT funding. Again, cis, white, rich institutions are quick to use our murders in their statistics then turn around and spend their money on organizations that look like them: cis, white, and rich. Organizations that push for assimilation.
Obviously financial support isn’t the be all end all action to support trans women of color, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. And the fact that it’s a struggle for trans women to acquire financial assistance is symptomatic of our society’s priorities. It points to who is valuable and who is disposable. At the bottom of this article is a list of fundraisers and organizations for trans women that I would strongly encourage you to support. If you’re not a trans woman and you’re reading this, think long and hard about the ways that you’re supporting trans women in your community. Do you see trans women in public community spaces? How are your actions pushing them out? Don’t think that just giving money nullifies your collusion in transmisogyny. Financial support is important but it is not the only step. As we honor the memory of those girls who have been murdered, ask how you’re helping the living.
Here is my first poem written regarding this thing called Transgender Remembrance Day. I wrote it last year on this day. It is located here:
Bleeding Light and Memory (Without Images for Structure)
I present it to you again today…and it has grown, shrunk, matured and gained its presence a bit.
In other words I edited it.
Please…read it and let the reality of it hit your heart with the tattoo needle and not the jester’s feather. Please be changed…how can we live if you won’t unbend, unfold and become? I am right there with you Constance, wings straining for every weft of breeze, sails hoisted and praying for that puff divine and transformative…
Love, Charissa
***** ***** ***** ***** *****
When light struck my soul I blazed fierce and exultant!
Into awareness, I bled joy so radiant just like the horizon
bleeds sunlight at dawn. I gazed in the gawky glass of exultation
(and I in my youth seeing darkly thru that glass)
I knew myself and was gaudiloquent and I was so glad and full,
I was so wonder-full.
Til it rained, titters fell tinkling down on heart-tin, then rebukes raging,
lashing at my roof and thrumming and drumming til I saw no more thru that
bright young glass darkly, but dull thru a lonely storm dimly and starkly
and everything eerie and glowing in green, and radioactive remarks so redactive
and careless cerulean comment, alas! I came to know what I was
and was not and I melted misshapen and crippled.
Then came the days long and same and repetitive,
passing by people of 2 kinds that easily pass, they belong
but they never see beyond, they never see inside the rose.
So I plucked throbbing buds, thorn blood price cheap and held them out
from my side of that dark glass wet with stormy tears, washy with rivers
of arrogant vain assumed presence attributing value and worth.
Life ground me down as it moved without mercy, a glacier inexorable
grinding in glances so cold and so frozen, that flow moving over
the dark silent boulders of being…I saw bones strewn round me
like gruesome pick-up sticks, cast-offs from careless hands,
players who tired of children’s games, children’s cruel nicknames,
grown weary they tore out their hearts with bare hands mad with grief
but the world grinding by didn’t care.
Until at last long from those dizzy heights brilliant awareness burst over me,
bleeding in fullness and in terror tinklings, thrumming and cold and that
startling certain blue clarity…I finally remembered who I am, and know
finally what I am, that I am, and my long lament “alas” nevermore uttered!
For I am become me…at last, me…a lass.
That’s me in a nutshell, my story and journey transgender…but what about you?
Will you take time to think and remember? Will you find mercy today?
Will you find the care? Will you go gently with us into our long night,
will you rage, rage with us gentle and bless now the living of the light
that’s straining to dawn bright and final in blazing clear beauty?
You too are dual natured, corrupt and dying and incorrupt rising!
We share one grim struggle, together the dead and together alive
in one deadly bold dual to live. You….are US. and we are you…
but you without arms, without eyes, without mouths
we scream loud and cry for release! We cry out
for the midwives of mercy to meet us and make us
so beautiful for situation at last and delivered of our awful charge.
OPEN YOUR EYES AND EARS FOR US.
See us…and hear us…don’t fear us, don’t fear to see yourself,
come stare down your own stormy floods, sit and listen!
Don’t be afraid to hear us, we’re the voice of the echoes you hear
in your own fearful nightmares of being, oh Daughters of Pharaoh!
Reach down and lift us up out of the reeds and mud! Because of you
a whole nation was freed, and we too are Eve’s sons and the daughters of Adam,
but trapped and acutely aware we are helpless! Too often we’ve fallen
to dread hands and dead eyes of no grace and no mercy
and no compassionate symmetry!
Today…here…
Light strikes in blacksmith blows,
soul sparks chip off and away on this day…
I intention…remember
my own radiant flood
bleeding light and day’s promise,
remember the resonant thunder,
remember the frowning floods
the gushing gouts
and the othering stares
and the brutal don’t cares
of long years I walked
in the country of lost men
and longing despair…
I remember the pangs and the waves and the lurching
of labor as I, pregnant with my own measureless mystery
and full of such knowing began to emerge and break forth
deep-touched forever warded by Grace, and kept safe
from that pit which has tripped far too many and eaten them,
chewed them like Goya’s devourer,
Zeus eating every last child in his madness and horror…
incarnate in this patriarchy that rounds us up
into its abattoir death camps like cattle
and herds us into chutes and charnal house horrors
of slaughter and blood-spattered baptism.
(let their fate haunt you
and give you holy hush
and give you sacred silence).
Dare. Look. Feel.
I will too, and somewhere
we will fight off those demons
compelling and fell
that haunt us and cause us
to rave and destroy…
Then we shall be set free to fly again
all together in one flock of birds
of all feathers and all calls
become One Glad Song!
We will dare to fly off
to the sun and beyond
where our song will bleed joy
and rain down on the earth
to bring healing and hope
home in Love…
forever…
together…
we’ll
Bleed
Radiant
Light.
Constance…I got fed up this year…well meaning cis-gendered people who yesterday and today started talking about remembering “all the poor dead transgendered people”…not because I do not think we should! God no! But I got fed up, because since my first one, last year, it seems to me that things have gotten worse and not better in terms of violent assaults, rapes and murders of transgender people.
This poem is my blunt confrontation of that fact, attitude, bent of being. It is me speaking in the voice of the dead.
*** *** *** *** ***
my face was bashed in,
smooth creamy skin
(lasered free of wiry black blunt hair)
only to be turned
purple ugly and pug,
battered blue
and then torn,
just a rug
yanked out from
under my life
and I
falling
desperately
flailing, then
dying there
on the dark brown
hardwood oak floor.
But that’s not good enough
(actually, not bad enough),
right?
There are penalties
for assuming the right to be,
for breathing while transgender…
so you grabbed that
red rusty fire extinguisher
from the dull chrome bracket
over my old pale green and white
deluxe Glenwood gas stove
(the one I used when
I made your favorite
red gravy and mushrooms
over pasta with cheese
and you smiled and said
I was a good woman,
but that was before
you ate your fill
and got bored).
and then you broke
my face against it,
pulped my nose and
broke my dead jaws
as you jammed the blunt end
down my slack throat
and I already
dead and already
flown away
but that’s not good enough
(actually, not bad enough),
right?
To let a transgirl
have a face
in her transgressive act
of saying I Am, well,
as the Dude says
(regal in all his privileged glory)
“This aggression will not stand, man!”
cus me, well
I am aggressive,
I am transgressive,
I dared to live,
I dared to cry
I dared to feel and
I dared to fly
I dared…
and died.
my face…bashed
my body…slashed
torn, stabbed and then
raped to make sure
I never rise from the grave,
my flesh thrown in the dumpster
with the rest of the trash
dead or alive,
and then set on fire.
Hey,
I don’t want you to worry though!
Because everything is AOK,
because Remembrance Day…
because remembrance day,
but how do you re-member me
after I am chopped to pieces
for the heresy of seeking
integration?
My name,
recited solemnly,
a legerdemain of modern time and place
masquerading as elegy and tribute to
trans-trouble, torches smoking,
choking and dead.
This mummery murmers
name by name
to appease the lurking beast inside
(such civilized animals)
and I see sage cis-heads
nod slow and I think
of bobble-heads bought
with gender currency and guilt,
bought with blood money
from gory grisly gruesome chests
passed down father to son
since Cain.
Tomorrow,
you’ll breathe deep,
sigh and toss salt
over your left shoulder
while forking off the evil eye
with your left hand
stabbing like a striking snake
against trans-mystery and tragedy.
And then you will fix your gaze
high on horizons, not even
glancing in gutters where we lay,
still and bleeding in our becoming
and desperate to re-member,
every day, especially those
days where you just
want to forget.
Dear Constance:
I am pressing this article here for you to go and read. I want you to know that I personally know people involved in this story.
I also want you to know that it is illustrative of 2 things:
First, just how much things have changed in the last 16 years! To read of how this matter was handled…to be reminded of it. Oh, I remember when it happened, and how back then “He said She said” was a viable defense, how helpless feeling I was, reading about these things, knowing in my gut the sick feeling that horror was playing out right before my eyes and yet my mind fogged by ignorance, privilege, and frankly by the kind of thought prevalent then and even now that says “a woman who goes to those places gets what she deserves”.
God…I am so sorry for that foggy ignorance!
The second thing this incident is illustrative of is this: for women? Nothing has changed! In thousands and thousands of years of abuse, violation, dehumanization, crushing…nothing has changed. So the culture today is catching up and getting better…does that make a victim feel any better in the moment? Does it make the violation less death-dealing? Does it somehow minimize the crime, in that the rest of us are getting up to speed? Does that make them better?
No…no. A thousand, million times no! How many women throughout history have been violated? Seriously…think about that number.
(And men, shut your pie-hole about the numbers of males who also have suffered. Yes, humans are absolutely demonically awful to each other, but the stark fact is that when you take the number of violations as a ratio to the overall population the overwhelming disparity is the stuff of legendary absurdity!)
I guess the final thing is this: I wept bitterly and deeply as I read this…because it triggered me in my own violations I endured…and they weren’t even physical in nature! So trying to imagine her plight, her horror, seeking to measure her courage was beyond me.
This is Transgender Remembrance Week…the week during which we remember the transgender human beings who have been murdered simply for “breathing while trans”. But today…broaden it out. Contemplate the ways great and small that it is “okay” for this sort of treatment to occur…
…and resolve to be a part of the change!
Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly.
Charissa
Brenda Tracy
Constance…I am in tears right now (I know, I know, I can hear you sigh and hear your eyes roll and say “What’s new, Charissa!!” giggle…always in tears)…
but it is true, I am. Because this devotion by Margaret Manning is about grace. And as you know, I picked that for my real name. Charissa…grace. Grace…grace.
Grace for me has always been about the power to do what God requires. It is the power given freely to us, and it is given to us regardless of what we “deserve”. And this power has two vital expressions: the power to overcome the challenges we face in our lives, and the power to be forgiven for the ways we fall short morally and spiritually, for the times we hide and cower in fear instead of walking with our heads high and our eyes clear, for the times we are petty and cruel, or mean and insensitive, or dull and totally unaware of our blundering tromping of toes and hurting of hearts…
Grace. A golden coin with a Heads and a Tails, spent as needed, and replaced as soon as it is spent.
Wanna hear something amazing about Grace? A writer long ago was inspired by Mama to tell us this: everywhere sin is and triumphs, Grace is as well, and is there in quantities and amounts that increase in availability exponentially relative to the presence of sin in those moments and places! If there are 10 “sin units”, then there are 10 x 10 Grace units! If there are a hundred sin, there is a hundred times hundred grace…and so on! The more sin there is, the more grace there is too…but not just coin by coin, but gold mine of grace for farthing of sin and diamond mine of grace for shilling of sin!!!
It’s just like light: the greater the darkness, the more power even one tiny light has!
But Margaret brought out something that was soo salient to me right now, right here…in the midst of extreme anxiety and distress and inner turmoil that really pushes hard against me to give up and leave forever…she spoke of Grace as a way of life! OH! How my spirit BURNS with those words!!!!
Grace…as a way of life. The way of Grace.
And that is why I am crying. In the midst of all the absolute falling apart of everything (except for me and my darling, ddh, and a few friends who know who they are cus I told them), I found myself looking at the betrayal, the accusation, the defamation, abandonment, judgement and malicious savage written and verbal attacks…looking at all that I “once had” disappear and in its place piles of pain and heaps of hatred…I had fixed my eyes on that.
But Constance…am I not gifted with opportunity most miraculous and glorious? Seriously: for one who has prayed for decades to be a person of grace and mercy, how can this come to pass without opportunity? And thus the onslaught…yes?
Grace as a way of life…the way of Grace. Because of her article, my eyes are lifted up again and onto the source of Grace, the one who’s Name is Grace.
Here is the takeaway for me, to whet your appetite:
If the grace-full life of Christ is the intended goal for those who claim to follow him, each day presents the opportunity to practice—to grow in the very grace Christ embodies. Instead of fear, there is empathy and hope. Instead of pride, there is humility and hospitality. Instead of bitterness and resentment, there is forgiveness and laying down one’s life. There is always a choice. And thankfully, there is always one who extends flawlessly the very grace we need ourselves.
I am in the oven.
Baking in the heat.
But I am also becoming a loaf of the bread of Grace.
May Grace ever abound in me and thru me and add to the superabounding of grace wherever wrong is present.
Charissa Grace
Constance, this devotional is by my favorite devotional writer Jill Carattini, and rather than copy and past it I decided to press it…
…and then copy out a poem here that she quotes. I was stunned by this poem…and Constance? You think I write poems?? *charissa laffs and shakes her head in wonder at the thought*
No, dear Constance…this is what a real poem, a grown up poem looks like!! Just wow.
| — | Tony Gaskins |
…seem very different to me when I view them thru these glasses…god what have I done to myself, and how do I undo it?
This is outrageous. I am sick of it, frankly…the answer that comes…each and every time…a woman is shot for resisting a man’s advances, a transwoman is killed for walking trans, a woman is beaten because she didn’t like the man’s catcalling…
…and each and every time comes the hot refrain “not all men”. And in that outrage comes the self-exoneration to take any responsibility whatsoever to change this absolute plague that is indeed of epidemic proportion. Women are treated like property, and around the globe like garbage.
Reminds me of Lot, who was looking for even 5 good men to ask God to stay His hand from destroying the cities so deeply inculcated in evil that they were beyond saving…after the evil was cut away nothing remained…
…modern man looking for some men somewhere who haven’t done this so they can continue to think of us as cattle, as property, as garbage, as objects existing to meet their needs and they the only judge and arbiter of what a need is and when it is and why it is and woe to you woman if you didn’t realise that the need changed you simply must be taught a lesson.
Every single male out there reading this: I have walked in your spaces unseen, and I know your thoughts and rationalizations and reasons and excuses and the way that very quickly into encountering a rant like mine this morning you smile and go to a happy place inside where the mantra runs something like “crazy-bitch alert, must be hormonal, humor the lil woman, must remember to bring flowers to distract her”…
…and then the discussions among yourselves of how she brought it on herself with her (fill in the blank)…
If you are reading this while male, then you are responsible to begin changing this, and doing so with vigor. You are the one with power. You are the one who can confront men without getting what I just wrote or a fist in the face. LISTEN: we don’t want what you HAVE…we want to be WHO we ARE! And what is truly pathetic is that you are blind to how much better you will be for it.
I know, I know…you don’t see it. My face has been in danger of being permanently blue from arguing with men and them resorting to slut shaming me (and this was before they even knew I was trans!) because I was imagining things…they remind me of fish in water with gills who claim that they have no special power whatsoever just because they can breathe in water.
Well, we have lungs and live on land…fishes! Try coming out of the water and walking in our world! Yeah, choking a bit, aren’t you?
What I am trying to say is that you need to look soberly at your participation in the rape and abuse and enslavement and othering and dehumanizing of half of the image of God. And if you have any integrity or guts, begin to walk different, talk different, and be different.
I wonder what a true man looks like, one who would treat me as a subject because I am in God’s Image, and not as an object because I am in Hugh Hefner’s image (or in derision because I with my transgender testosterone wrecked monstrosity called a body am not)?
So just in case you think I am fantasizing…
I got tired of printing screen, but I could have gone on…the rest of the day…and tomorrow too.
Men, you say good things happen all the time from men to women?
Prove it.
Start with not raping us. beating us…no wait! This is even easier…pay us the same amount of money for the same work, and give us access to the same jobs and positions. Leave the safety of the lil boys clubs and walk in the world as men who are committed to using their strength and guts to place others above themselves.
Do Justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly.
Charissa
PS: I just have to share this funny: I just said something to my baby about how the Entitlement Mantle is the evil perversion of the Harry Potter Invisibility Cloak!! lol
“What are you complaining about? We have to run the same distance as you, so it’s equal!” (seen online)
They stood there,
silhouetted against the sunrise
and rifles aimed, at me
silhouetted against the velvet dark
of dawning and birth and being,
silhouetted against that red brick wall.
21 guns, barrels like unblinking eyes,
black, flat depths unblinking too
and peering from their graves
in grim unfeeling determination
to put me in my place,
put me in my grave,
put me back with them.
There are 3 bullets among them,
the 21 guns staring unblinking and grim,
and they comfort themselves with lies
that they do not know who has the bullets…
but I do, I know, I see
the silver winking bright
in the unblinking barrels
once (Father!)
twice (Forgive them!)
thrice (They know not what they do!)
And then the lightning struck
in those volleys of thunder raining down
over my ears as my eyes went bright
and my vision streaked red and silver
in terror and tragic tremour and
violent shuddery release.
It knocked me out of my shoes
and pinned my shadow against that
smooth red brick wall, now pitted
three times pitiless and gaping,
and I felt funny somehow, floating there,
hanging light and airy, somehow too light
without my shadow, crumpled
and remaining nailed
to brick and beam
by palm and palm and foot
and those empty shoes, kicked akimbo
by my eager rushing exit from that place.
Right under their noses!
I rose up unseen
while they stared on
in horror and resignation
except for the three
who leered in hungry glee
and desperate jealous lusty thirst.
But for just a bit, I stayed,
to move from gun to gun
and kiss the barrels each one cold
(and 3 so hot and acrid)
and then I began to rise and leave,
when I heard some flat dead zombie voice say
“get that thing out of here and clean this mess up”.
I saw that it was one of them,
a former being who was
a current corporate walking dead
(but hey, see this company credit card?)
and dressed
in shoes and sunglasses
and lumpy
in the dawn’s early light
and I couldn’t tell
what was more offensive:
my shoes skewed
sideways and useless
or my shadow
pinned and unmoving?
I shed one celestial tear
and rose up on the sound
of 21 flat cracks still ringing
and I leapt graceful
on feet bare and light
from sounds of wrong
to sounds of ever right
and found my wings
midst the flurry of sound and fury
and flew away for good
to a 21 gun salute.
Hanging here,
this moment,
this drifty-floaty
timeless moment,
timeless
like the moment just before
a leaf decides to let go
but the tree doesn’t yet know it,
so it waits, the leaf, it waits
to leave and never return.
It’s this moment, still,
between determined faith and action,
between sharp heart felt questions
(like whether God loves me or tolerates me, or cares or hears my prayers or is even near?)
and dark deep-felt screaming
despair unquestioning running
ragged and burning in flames
undulating from faith to action
shoving hard against paralysis.
This drifty floaty
timeless moment
lingers, lurches,
lunges, becomes
that drifty floaty
timeless movement
torn loose,
tossed down
spinning down
pinwheeling down
and it drops, it drifts,
it breaks and crashes, it dashes
into a thousand brilliant colors
and a million diamond drops
each and everyone shouting forever
I was!
I was, in my birth,
and I am!
I am in my courage
and I will be!
I will be
in the sea
and its salty desire, in the dirt
and its brown gritty tang,
in tree roots drawn up liquid again
from the ground to the limbs thru the leaves there to breathe
and to fly up and shine
in the glowing deep night
in the twinkle and tingling cold there to
glitter and shimmer like silver elixir
for seraphim thirsty in splendour…
slaking the thirst of angels…
stoking desire in God…
then, now
someday, now,
hanging in this moment
midst the fragrances of hope
and stormy lightning-strike ozone
stark and fresh and scintillating
in the stillness of the moment,
of the drifty-floaty moment
before movement,
this drifty-floaty timeless moment
Good morning Constance…and Pamela! 🙂
If you have been reading here a while you will know that I was sooo blessed by Mama to run across Lynda Bullerwell…her site is over at forget-me-not .
I am continually amazed by her poetry and the truly significant and moving poems she writes. But even more, I have been amazed and warmed and felt such connection in how it is as if we share the same muse, a flitty lil fairy of the realm Poetic who loves to sprinkle her magic pixie-poety dust upon us each, and then scrape if off and sprinkle the mix onto each other!
There have been times when we wrote nearly the exact same poem, and yet it had different clothes on, and revolved around different images, but it was still the same one…and lately for me, as I have been choked by sorrow, burdened by betrayal and assaulted by online a-holes, Lynda has been my surrogate, and has written out my own hurts and haunts and hallelujahs.
I am ever so grateful…company in this life, especially in inner spaces that had always been solitary territories, is such a gift, such a precious gift.
Lynda wrote a poem yesterday, which just pulled a comment out of me as if I had been with her in the poem’s conception and making. It tumbled out of me breathless and intoxicated and full of determination to tattoo itself to our outside skin just as Lynda’s poem had tattooed itself inside our heart.
Lynda loved it (thank you for that, Sis), and suggested that I post the comment…and I thought that a collaborational moment may even be better? She loved that too.
So here is our poem…hers, and mine. I am taking liberties with her lines and meter. Any deficiences therein are my mistakes, and any glories revealed were already there.
PS: Lynda, if it just simply cannot work for you, let me know and I will put it in its original form, which is just fine! It was the collaborative notion that appealed to me!
Love, Charissa
❤
We could visit Paris, walk in the rain
without an umbrella and sit
on the steps of Eglise Saint-Etienne-du-Mont
when the clock strikes twelve and we are back
in that club rubbing shoulders with Hemingway;
shots of wisdom swirling in cocktail glasses
with cherries, olives or whatever you fancy;
culture parading its diversity
in paintings by Picasso
that make you take a second look
and wonder where a mind could go
to find such muse, blue and clearer than sea water,
these syllables that taunt you in your sleep,
weigh on you in vibrant colors of indigo, azure;
scents of lavender filling pretty stationary
tempting you to write, scratching you
from the inside, these words dying to escape
from pink painted lips that only
want to feel that last goodnight kiss.
TWO: Post-Midnight Aperitifs
(Paris, Pretty Paris)
…but when my limpid pen stirred
to stroke across the paperskin, to move
light mountains like what we saw, it only
squeaked with dry throat and trembled
…oh that wine, it made me laff and you
looked so CUTE with that escargot, and omg
did our sexy waiter actually brush your arm???
and hey thanks for that lil white flower,
truth is it breaks my heart
more than this Picasso guy, cus he’s no Van Gogh…
…and your laughing lullabye to me last nite
as we slept, you there, and me here,
our stockings half on half off, in
our intoxicated heady cuvée
of life and grape and sea and garden
and you silly songed me to sleep…
…but i most of all loved when
you saw him, Hemingway and pointed
him out to me and me drunk just a scosh,
I said he looked like Hawmingway
cus he hemmed and hawed so much
trying to figure out if he wanted to be brave or to be dead
…and you cackled like the gypsy woman did when we
put those silly hats on our heads backwards and sideways
while we lingered at her table there in the street
and she spelled the money out of our purses
…most of all I loved that…
cus you made me feel brave and knowing
that i was vital and alive and would never die
no matter how tired and sleepy i eventually get.
Love, your companion in our Paris,
our Principality of Poetry in
our Province of Wonder…
your co-conspiritor Charissa,
Sis
all was hushed and quiet, so still
that the fiercely beaten air
fanned by that ruby throated
hummingbird became a hurricane.
her breath was fast and furious
in crimson jeweled puffs darting,
diving streaky panting gasps,
her wings whirring, fluttering frantic
roaring in the looming silence,
in my towering still moment
me so quiet here, so settled
and so solid that Nia-gara Herself would
whimper and under her breath
would mumble terse and choked,
reduced to churny tumble.
then a solitary cricket
just erupted into singing
and then nothing dared to stir
dared draw breath or dared to move…
and there,
in this space of cricket clamour,
in the hurricane of hummingbird winds
blowing but so far away
on lost lamenting shores
(in the edges, in the edges)
and an instant comes, arrives
when a wave is born and rises up
no longer sea but now itself
and knowing time and longing
to emerge and run forever
to the moon and to the shore…
this kinetic stillness stretches
in this intersecting moment
touching time and touching timeless
from the whirring wings aflutter
and the cricket in the gutter
and Niagara’s jealous mutter
to this wave leapt up from clutter
hanging on that crucifix there
not yet broken by its futile try
to fly across the endless sky
to kiss the moon and touch
her golden placid face…
the moment…the wave
hanging
no more sea from which it heaved
but not yet broken and unbalanced,
not yet shattered on the edges
not yet fractured there forever
to be that wave again…
…never…
that one moment of moon passion
and that rushing exaltation
(in the eye, in the song, in the mutter of this matter)
and then the moment shatters
and foretells a falling future
and the wave loses its option
has no way to retain wholeness
and just slide back unobtrusive
to the silver sea unbroken
there to merge again with nothing
and unknowing.
and the hummingbird is stricken
in the sound and in the breaking
of a moment and a wave
in a hurricane of movement
midst the singing of the cricket
and the mutter of that falls
and it darts away, is gone,
trailing airy sangre breaths
and the cricket falls asleep
and Niagara is emboldened
to again assert Her tumble
and the hurricane is gone,
yes the moment it has broken
and the Voice of God has spoken
in the quiet, in the mist.
but for me, well moments still
string together into prayer beads
slipping smoothly thru my fingers
as I mutter like Niagara
and I sing the cricket song
with my hurricane-heart flutter,
wings a-beating with such longing
for another rising moment
to arrive and to break over me
in knowing soft moon passion
and a promise of redemption
and release to finally rise
and fly away, my spirit panting
in red puffs and exaltation
when I reach the shore so broken
I can be no more there broken…
until then, well I will live,
midst the whirring,
in the singing
thru the muttering
in the breaking
on the shores
of Golden Morning.
Charissa's Grace Notes 
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