Ode For Orlando

I saw the stars fall in the night
it was dark and closing in
as I lay paralysed and still
and shivering in deathly fright.

In waves and showers down they plunged
as sable curtains tore and trembled
in the hand of some great evil
threatening to eat the sky
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But somehow, each one shot to me
and landed in my shaking soul
and burned within me fierce and fell
and banished fear and made me whole

Until I burned with stellar fire
and shone in gold galaxy gleams
my heart a starfield bold, untamed
for Mercy’s greater than hate’s schemes!
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And so, though Nebulas collapse
let them fall fast to this earth
into your open mouth and heart
Not for destruction, but for birth

Of new stars brilliant, unshakeable
that shine with Justice and with Joy
Children born of grief and ash
Who rise above hate’s cruel slash
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This is our birth, our ne’er turn back!
A thousand stars, a million dreams,
A myriad songs and voices shout
We burn bright…our light…

will never…never…burn out
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Unfurling From A Set-Free Throat

I still struggle to dig it out,
that splinter you shoved into me,
down my throat without so much as
a shot of whiskey or
a shot in the dark.

and you are so certain, sure
of how to walk the world
and all her streets unfurled
when really you are justifying
dwelling in your fear.

But you look so damn normal and together
while I am flailing in the maelstrom of myself.
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Here is what you do to me:
Idealize
Exoticize
Misunderstand
Validate
Vindicate
Vilify
Victimize
Re-traumatize
Reframe
Take out of context
Murder mysteries

You lecture me, slay me with
hidden sneers and resurrect me with
empty scripts and steal my mystery…

and mysteries become stories
and stories become reality
and stories shape the mind
that tells and gives them shape.

stories about “them”
stories about “me”
stories about “you”
stories that isolate us,
separate and set us apart
from the world at large.
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You simply have no clue of how
the mind can terrify, filled up
with anguish, upset, turmoil, fury,
the mind makes meanings out of shadows
and is too easily taught
to fear what it does not know…

And that is your biggest blindest blunder:
You do not know what you do not know
and thus you fear the healthy YOP
unfurling from a set free throat!
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Your mind assumes what it cannot
make out clearly or take out easily.

It’s a survival tactic.

But it inhibits you from being open to learning.
It inhibits you from being students of life.

You’d be well-served to sit your assumptions down.
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Honor And Shame: Yes, All Men

Climb that hill you Sentient Beast
Burdened by your Greed, your pride
Haunted by your stinking fear
Rotted deep inside.

Carrying your mouldy loaves
Stolen from The Lord of Old
on the day five thousand fed
from His blessing told.

Shame is under your right arm
Honor carried by your left
As you sneak around, you snake
In eating you’re bereft

Love Wins

I am sharing this for those of you who love God dearly, and yet still struggle with NT teaching (actually lack thereof) regarding sexual orientation. You KNOW deep in your bones that you are wrong to conflate someone’s state of being with someone’s behavior…and yet you live in such fear that somehow God will punish YOU if you are not mean and nasty to someone who’s being is something that you do not believe can be.

Here is the problematic passage, out of 1 Corinthians chapter 6, a passage in which Paul is speaking prescriptively to a body of believers who were so caught up in judging one another’s activities that he had to castigate them for their reprehensible hatred. He moves to a rather broad net of behaviors that he casts, designed to cover every single person who may think they had standing to boast of their own righteousness, and then he begins to teach about how the behavior of each can bring dishonor to the entire body of Christ, as we are all together comprising the Temple of Holy Spirit…and then he concludes with a discussion of the topic of sexual immorality (which he leaves remarkably undefined btw, but would most certainly include the sexual behavior of heterosexually oriented human beings.).

My purpose here is not to break down the mistranslation into English that happened during the translating of the KJV in 1612…there are scholars who understand the nuances of the Greek text far better than I. Rest assured that with a bit of Google-fu you can locate many articles that will help you become informed.

{UPDATE:  Here is a great one that did not exist when I originally published this post…

My quest to find the word ‘homosexual’ in the Bible  }

LAY ALL THAT ASIDE FOR A MOMENT THOUGH…

Here is the reality of what goes on: Cis-het Christian who lives in fear that you will offend God if you do not hate and reject LGTBQ-oriented human beings, I am talking to you!!
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Here is the passage:
“9 Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals,[a] nor sodomites, 10 nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.”

Now, let’s see: I spot behaviors in this passage, behaviors that all focus on choices of the will…choices to commit various sexual sins (still not talking about orientations), choices to break commitments made to God and to other human beings (adultery and idolatry, which is a VERY tricky and subtle fault), choices to be envious that result in theft and coveting other people’s possessions, choices to become drunk and pursue a lifestyle of choice to indulge escaping from mature and fruitful living, choices to speak with anger and intense hatred in bitter speech to other human beings (yunno, like the comment section of articles), choices to THREATEN PEOPLE INTO DOING WHAT YOU WANT THEM TO…like the shunning that YOU REGULARLY DO to those whose ORIENTATIONS are imagined by you to be behavioral choices…

and yet somehow, ALL of the above choices you extend Grace and Mercy to, and almost all of those choices you have almost certainly been blood-guilty of yourself!! But you sit cheek and jowl in the pew with your fellow “unrighteous” and allow for yourselves and your cohorts in unrighteousness to participate in the Righteousness of Jesus and thus not only be forgiven, but in your mind EXCUSED from scrutiny…and you are content with the understanding that each person must scrutinize themselves with God (oh wait: Paul said that he did not judge even himself, for God is Judge)…

…and like electric barbwire your eyes SEIZE those English words about homosexual behavior that is the equivalent of a heterosexual choice that is unbalanced and abusive (which is what is being called out by Paul, btw!! Any sexual relationship that is exploitative and destructive to either partner is wrong, regardless of sexual orientation!)…and you make them into your scapegoats, and you WRITE OFF ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS WITH YOUR FAT BUTTS FIRMLY IN THE SEAT OF JUDGEMENT!!

You know this is wrong…you F**KING KNOW that it is WRONG! So you make up platitudes about how you love the sinners but hate the sins…yeah I call supreme bull shit on that one! Because if you did? You would extend to EVERYONE the exact same pass you give first yourself and then everyone else YOU deem is worthy of it.

You need to repent, and I mean right now, and climb down out of the judgement seat and work on taking the friggin LOGS out of your eyes that you have been beating God’s little lambs with incessantly!!
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The irony is that Paul ends that passage with words about the works of Jesus to wash, sanctify and justify whosoever will believe in Jesus, and goes on to say that ALL THINGS ARE LAWFUL!!! And yes, all things are not helpful and many things are indeed harmful.

But his point is that the Work of Christ is GREATER THAN all human behavior and renders judgement of one another as not only null and void but likely a far more insidious and poisonous sin than any of the listed behaviors.

Humans are born, created in Their Image and given a certain being. Among the aspects of that being are our sexuality and our gender…and each of those aspects together with EVERY OTHER GIVEN ASPECT OF OUR BEING is to be brought to our Precious Lord and presented to Them as our suitable offering of Love, and then LIVED OUT as THEY lead us, according to the LIFE that is in THEM and thus flowing into and through US!

Our gender orientations can thus be reflections of the glory of God and mirrors pointing to Their Love and Grace.

Our sexual choices and behaviors can thus be reflections of the glory of God and mirrors pointing to Their Love and Faithfulness!!

And GOD FORBID that we take any aspect of our given beings and use it as a club on someone else’s precious head!

“20 For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body[c] and in your spirit, which are God’s.”

I can guarantee you, however, that your current inner judging of the LGTBQ community is a leprotic infection deep in your soul and in actuality you heap up for yourself such a severe measure by which you shall soon be judged.

May God be true, and love win.

On Being Triggered and Abandoned (or NOT)


“When you are triggered, it can feel like moving a mountain to soothe the pathways of abandonment, and to stay embodied to the energy as it surges through your belly and nervous system.

Something is longing to be met, that is for sure. An avalanche of previously disowned feeling, emotion, and sensation, seeking some sort of completion that was not available at an earlier time.

It may seem that there is no way for you to close the loop, that it’s just too much. Open your heart into the too-much-ness, slowly, for very short periods of time, and then rest. Even for just a couple of seconds, use your presence to touch what is emerging – just enough to light up a new path, but not so much that you overwhelm or re-traumatize yourself.

Soften into your belly, into the panic, and take pause from the ancient belief that you must quickly understand, shift, or transform your immediate experience. See that there is nothing to ‘heal,’ but only something to hold. Offer sanctuary for the movement of life as it washes through you, and it will integrate and liberate on its own. Care for yourself in new and wild ways.

To provide a home for sacred metabolization is one of the greatest gifts of love that you can give – not just to yourself but to those around you. To reclaim embodied responsibility for the orphaned pieces of your psyche and soma is not easy and requires a lot of practice. But more than anything, it demands an unconditional commitment to seeing the entirety of your inner experience as worthy, as valid, and as the very seeds of the path forming around you.

Despite how difficult it can be, the fruits of this work are infinite, they are eternal, and to do this may be why you have come here: To make an offering to a weary world, and to do whatever you can to help others, to rest in their majestic true nature.”

Bending Over Backwards

i find myself constantly
bending over backwards
to become the table
the banquet feasting table
that my enemies
come and sit down to
a meal that I serve up
before they rise and run
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To Firetongue

Just because that’s the way you remember it doesn’t mean that’s the way it happened.”

(via deeplifequotes)

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Dick-tator

elaborate
intricate
wrought
invested
imposing

it’s still just
a brutal lock
and my subjugation
your only key

Your Masquerade

your finger comes at me
like you think
you are God

well, it would
if you actually thought.

but you don’t
think
you just assume

and instead of sparks
you give ice chips of death
yes, that’s it, you throw off
sparks of death and call it life
in your masquerade

And Dogs Ran At Us Hard

we soared high on currents,
uplifts unseen by human eyes
but oh so visible to us,
we dancers in the skies…

ever young and long did we thus fly

until we tired and we had need of
landing, resting, manna sweet to feed our
honking hearts, our silky souls to
take wing once again, in skies…

we thought forever we would fly

until that day the clarion calls they sounded
and the promises of haven-rest resounded
to our ears, our listening ears though with our eyes
we saw nothing but blind…blinds…we just saw blind

and swooping sounds from where?

and so we flew, we glided lower, lower
and so the guns did bloom and boom
and shot us from the keening clenching air
in lead-packed punches to the breast…

that took away our very breath

until we died, and dogs ran at us hard
to carry us triumphantly back into Massa’s yard
we, feathers fouled in blood, in gore, in mud
our necks floppy and broken in that flood…

of death that finally claimed us as its prey.

Close Vests

“play it close to the vest
came the granite words beating
against my face cascading
on craggy cliffsides or was it

like cannons booming and crashing,
coinvesting indifference and distant
assumption, consumption and
constant presumption?
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I couldn’t tell which was true
which one was stronger,
the smug or the deaf or
the dumb, cus they had

no ears, not that they
wanted to hear my voice
or my heart or my soul
desperate, traumatized, hurt…

But they certainly had words, oh yes,
and their unctuous tones quickly
said everything I was supposed to know
and nothing else…nothing else.
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Close…play…  “it”…vests
what are vests?
And what does it mean
to play close…to a vest?

The vestiary vague and looming
is that closet where play can
be kept oh so close to the vest
(or costumes donned for cover)

The vestibule tells a different story
than the vestiges of vestiaires
that peek out from under those
fanciful covers…it looks so calm.
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Which place is the womb
of a travesty played out, and
which one can make someone
divest a warm heart for stone?

Vests…what are they…hmmm…
There is gravest…that might be worth
playing close to, since crisis might
confront the bravest…in gravest?

But just the naivest?  Well,
easy to push, just invest all
your privilege/position in triplicate!
And no one will ever be wiser!
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I think vestal virgin
might be the best vest
as they cultivate flames
and harvest the fire

To keep the community
safe and secure well,
that vest I definitely
can play oh so very close…

play…is that a joke?
it…the most common term for me.
close…near, or shut off?
to the vest…I ask again which one?

Vests and me do not really
know about one another
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I’m A Why

you do your best
to deny me but when
you can’t, you would rather
use me than see me

you don’t even know
you are not aware
of how much is denied me
already forever
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the body, the flesh
the flesh become word
the love of my own kind
her intimate touch, and

what I’ll have never,
well is it offset
by what I do have…
and just what is that?
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rejection by children?
gaslighting my past?
shunning me, shutting me
outside my group?

you pigs called “big men”
I am not like you
though cursed with your flesh
my heart never yours
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and you princesses, women
my soul…same as yours
but my body a charnel house,
nothing in common

locked out of inside
locked in from outside
why do I linger?
why…I’m a why

Higher Than Hollywood

it is high above the smoke, the noxious fumes,
stench belched from bulls and bullies, flesh and steel
above the ego faces that still shield
the hearts and empty hovels lurking there

you know, that land of dreams that nightmare breeds
to stalk the streets where zombies walk in peace
that feeding ground of brains not being used
that parched and soulless place of no relief

lead me higher, sit me in the dirt
at least I feel vibrations of real life
in every grain of sand and pebble hard
and hold me, till I know that I’m alright

Your Silence

The tiny echoes of your
small silence are dwarfed
by the elephant in the room
hiding under the lampshade
of your indifference.

I said it, yes
I said it.

You don’t say anything
even though I wait
every night and endure
every desert day hiding
under the hot sun
of my charade.
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It’s time for bed
and I lay down
and still you don’t break
but instead you take
your silence-cuffs
and chain me
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the nightlight goes out
so you turn on the light
overhead and it bears down
bright
relentless
and sterile

just
like
your
silence.
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On Living The Gospel

It is not so much our slogans and statements, our creeds and commitments as it is the way we walk them out with our flesh and blood.  Documents are empty hulls of potential…and every single day that we truly live those commitments we give them flesh from our flesh and blood from our blood.
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The challenge posed by staunch commitment to broken people is that you then will have dealings with broken people.
This can be troublesome if you unconsciously expect that broken people will live and act unbroken. If you dribbled a crystal globe, and it shattered, and then when you touched a piece and it cut you or poked you, the challenge you would be facing would be full blown in how you reacted to being cut.
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That is where the reality of creeds, statements and slogans truly emerges…the ones who react in shock or outrage or horror are the ones who thought that globe was a basketball. The ones who recoil in horror or anger or disgust are the ones who believed it was a soccer ball.
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That is the distilled essence of walking out the Gospel: realizing that it is a message that attracts the hungry, the lost, the broken and it is not the creed which transforms but the living Presence of Christ IN that creed that does the work of healing and restoration.
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Which means to live the Gospel is to be inconvenienced, to be confronted with wounds that stink and are infected, to change the emotionally and spiritually incontinent…and to do it in patient joyful tenderness.

Someone can make their point with stern words and terse actions…it is not hard whatsoever to understand a point that has been made…and someone else can walk their love with gentle hands and consistent presence, and then ask for whatever they want as the broken heal, and slings are discarded and casts are cut off and the lame begin to walk.
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And then…deeper…closer…at the pulsing core…the revelation that is couched in those words from the cross “Forgive them Father…they do not know what they are doing.”

Those words have such compassion and understanding in them…they assume that most people would do good things if they REALLY KNEW the impact their troubling actions are having.

It’s such a good thing that we are coming to the place where we can even see that our statements and commitments and creeds have a unique calling to be expressed in our current climate…

it’s an even better thing when we count the cost…

it’s the best thing of all when we keep going and the word(s) become flesh.
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Dancing Double-Time

the glacier moving blue
and stolid crushing step
inevitableness
occasionally makes noise
as it crushes rock
and crumbles it to dust
it listens to the waterfall
cascading off of granite cliffs
and hurling thru exultant air
and roaring in its falling flight

and does not understand
the tumult ringing loud
and shout of exultation
its liquid sister sings
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and so in all its stolidness
the icy glacier murmurs
that waterfall should fly
but quiet in the night
and careful in the day

and keep her singing heart
concealed within her breast
and hidden in the light
and tumbling down…
sssssllllloooooowwwww…
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as if a waterfall
could not sing, ever sing
in joyous flying freedom
and just gallumph along
like glaciers, crawling over
whatever may be there

glaciers grind all things to dust
but waterfalls can fly
and waterfalls can shine
and waterfalls can sing
and wash the stones so clean
and leave them shining there…
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glaciers…wearing vests
waterfalls…loud, blessed
and dancing double time
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One Week Of Hell

I am astounded at the absurdity and the letdown of the last 7 days.

I have learned that I am cursed with the notion that words mean things…specific and precise things, and some words can morph, can shape-shift depending on the wind or the light…or the scents in the air…

and so I have collected them…words. I use them like a carpenter uses finish tools, like a furniture maker wields her instruments of creation.
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But I have also learned that others do not…

…others do not know that words mean things (they ass-u-me)
…others do not CARE that words mean things
…others use words carelessly
…others use words lazily
…others use words clumsily
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So the next thing I learned is that other people freak out when I ask what they mean…they get upset, or angry, or worst of all puzzled, as if I speak in a foreign language, as if I am an animal that suddenly went Narnia and began to utter intelligible sounds…but since I am just an animal they need not be considered seriously, it is just a lucky co-incidence.

This freaks me out greatly when this happens…being a sufferer of brain trauma, this ambiguity and denial of meaning is like throwing gasoline on a fire and expecting it to go out like water has been applied to those unwanted and despised flames.

So I devised a coping strategy…I decided to ask for clarification.
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“I don’t understand, would you please clarify?
“I am uncertain as to what you mean, would you please explain?”
“I am anxious and scared because the ramifications of what you said shout and gibber at me and I have no hiding place…will you please give me definition and reassurance, or if not then out with the guillotine and lop off my head?”

Sometimes, when I ask this, people deny there is anything to define…the inference is that I am crazy, reading too much into the words, finding things that are not there, and that I just need to mellow out.
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“Take things for face value” they say.

I tried that. It led to betrayal and violation and deeper/horrific trauma and a conflagration that nearly was my end…thank God for God and for Phoenixes.

So that didn’t work so well…or rather, it utterly broke and stained for good that place inside which could (a little) stay still and let go and take something on its face…this is utterly absurd anyway, given the combination of words that are so carelessly used and the mutual exclusivity of those combinations…to take most statements at face value is to accept meaningless absurdity and to bathe in the vile flow emanating forever from the ruins of the tower of Babel.

This led to a different strategy…that of survival.
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Maslow wrote about the hierarchy of needs, ranging from survival to self-actualization, and emphasized that when survival was in question self-actualization was a pipe dream if it was even present in the threatened consciousness.

I learned that words cannot be trusted when they are loose and running wild in packs like rabid dogs. I learned that other people do not want or will not choose to place them on leashes and seek to master them and use them for life rather than death.
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(“The power of life and death is in the tongue” says the sage)

As I survive, I discover people and places where there are indications and implications that I might find sanctuary. I begin to trust, begin to hope…and then comes the dilemma…undefined words, confusing communication contradictory and capricious…

What do I do? Whenever I ask for clarity, that ask is offensive, shocking, puzzling, incomprehensible? But if I don’t ask, then I am doomed by this:

In the lack of clarity, I am compelled (powerless in this, actually) to find the worst possibility and the shade of meaning that places me in the worst place…and that becomes my truth.

Which of course leads others to heap on even more incredulity, and they say to me THEIR truth of me…

…as if I am an idiot for thinking what I think in the face of ambiguity…

which actually drives me deeper into the fires.
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In these last 7 days this has happened to me…and I have happened to it as well, for I sought clarification…in open words, in more words than others consider decorous (because I want to be as sure as I can that I am clear in what I am saying)…in plain pleading plaintive words…begging words with empty cup extended in front of my dirty street urchin face…

and the bottom of lower than the worst has been the result…

The very worst thing, the ultimate blow that anyone can give to me in this place…

…………… is silence……………
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no response
no reply
no nuffin

That silence has a voice. Did you know that? Silence speaks?

In knives
In slashes
In crushing fog weighty and inexorable
Silence gibbers sinister
Silence threatens with burbly graveyard chuckles
Silence goose-steps over my grave in shivery stampings

Silence screams that I am nothing
Silence screams that I am soon going to be eaten
(but only after I have been torn apart)
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Torn apart by words…for it is on the other side of silence that others finally speak words…imprecise, wielded clumsy and ham handed, lacking nuance and deftness…and me, Andromeda without a Perseus caught there by my wrist, chained while the imprecision feeds on my liver in gnawing knife pecking beaks and ripping tearing talon claws…

It is in these moments that I wish it would just stop.

Just.
Stop.
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I have recognized this is also mostly the result of trauma in my life, and of that I have recently written…no, you cannot just “mellow out”, just “relax”, just “let it go and choose different”…thank you very much for your insensitive and ignorant admonitions…give me some credit, and imagine that a being as complex as myself might have tried that a time or trillion…no.

Trauma is with you like your skin, but it is a skin inside your skull and made solely of cockleburrs and foxtails.
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And that is where this poem comes in…”Nothing Rhymes Orange

It is short, considerably shorter than the ravings of this post (now you see why I love to speak in poem and nuance and layers)

Words
Uncertainty
Anxiety
Fear
Ask for clarity
Silence

That is the road for Charissa that leads to hell.
5 days of hell, and me still here and no one understanding the fortitude or fierce fight that I have been in simply to be here prattling on and on and on and on…

Silence says to me “Just shut up and go away”

Silence is the siren call crooning and never have those sharp rocks looked so inviting, so final, so untroubling in their destructive shadow.

But I? Well, I guess that I am even worse than bad…because in the face of repudiation and rejection shouted so eloquently in that Silence slouching towards this Bethlehem, I don’t even have the good sense to go…the courage to go? The integrity to go? Is that it? Prolly that is it since my integrity is called into question in the imprecision and indefinite miasma that masquerades as communication…

Is it that I am stubborn? Is it that I am curious and want to see how it ends without me breaking character and stepping off the stage in Act 3 of 5?

I dunno…I will just go with the end of “Papillon” (those curious can search my blog for that, those not curious, well why are you even still reading…did I not lose you in the Labyrinth of my words?? ‘Ware the Minotaur, sojourner!!).tumblr_nz5hbkmuDM1qahpcmo1_500
I WILL NOT BE SILENT, even though so many will…

but I won’t lie either. These last 5 days have been a living hell inside my skull, and it hurts so bad.

More Hills

Everybody
wants to be king
of a hill
and that hill
just a pile
of dust
hot and red
and dry
or a dungheap
so silent
and stinking
with malice.
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And yet
with more kings
than hills
and more dirt
than heart
and more dung
than wisdom
we just
collect hurt
and more hurt
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from wounds
and from cuts
and from boots
on small faces
from despairing cries
and from silence
and malice

we just build more hills.
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Poem Of Horror

I wonder in stars
inverse black against
skies of light why
I wasn’t worth
the fight.

empty my skull
with a spoon thru my eyes
scrape the bone clean
and give me the peace
of an empty mind

worthless
no value
no beauty
just me
in my
traumatized
brain

screaming always
and keening
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The Cruelty Of The Ordinary

I am at an end of some kind
an end of expecting pink
when the sun arrives and departs
an end of hoping someone
somewhere would get it.
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I am at an end of expecting anyone to
actually understand shooting stars
streaking thru the night and
my words piercing pulsing
pricks of light thru dull
dark and choking
indifference…
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or any yearning
to pay attention
to urgent and plaintive
cries.

I who am
healed in words
am at last wounded
by words and endless
accusations and slander
and the opaque screens of untruth

I have been broken
I have been violated
I shall never
be clean again
I don’t think I will
ever be whole again
or fit for any service
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the light thru the window merely
heightens that separation and
the scraggly fingers waiting
to claw my heart to ribbons
and lick the talons clean

in the moments between
sunrise and sunset
in the cruelty
of the ordinary
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I Am Double

I am double
I am here and somewhere else
I am in caves of coming futures
staring out at fires casting shadows
of the past that flicker, flounder
and then disappear.
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I am winter and I’m summer
I am autumn with some spring
thrown into my yellow gold veins
surging and pulsing with everlife
straining to throw off apples and pears
and some of that fruit

without a proper name.
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I am true blue trueheart covered in shit-words
I am singing never silent song chained by silence.
you can call me whatever you want to call me
it doesn’t change who I am.
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I am double.
I am here and somewhere else.

Pain-t-pot

Terse words…Words muddy
and swirling and steaming
like cream in cold-coffee
like death in soft-nectar
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words lumbering lead-footed
fat flat and hard hulking
fear-shadows are lurking
in other death-words
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words rain down like brain bombs
explode in uncertainty
pregnant with confusion
communion of judas-kiss
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they use words like bullets
to shatter my skull
and blast my brain bloody
and turn my head into
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an urn full of red
a paint-pot of death
that they can drink deep of
and spit on their canvases
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in words and in brush strokes
dipped into the paint-pot
that my brain has become
from traumatic words
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the top of my skull
ripped open by shrapnel
and now just a pain-t-pot
now just a pain-t-pot
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ever Spring, ever Autumn

it looks the same to you
whether you stand
in winter or summer

…the gate of my heart…

stark and golden and hot
against that steely variegated sky,
all clouds and light run thru God’s Grater
and piled up in slivers and shavings
of glory and stellar glimmers

of more…
The Great Gate

I stand in spring and autumn
my feet in water and my face in fire,
my roots ever fed with freedom
and my branches ever shedding
the ends of growth and fruitful life
blossoming, falling, spilling to earth
in cascades of truth and fevered dreams.
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my angles and lines seem stark to you
and you miss my curves and swaying
limber-love and hurly-heart throbbing
with the promise of harvests coming
and heavy with the presence of harvests here.

walk thru and look…
if you see me you will know
and if you do not see me
step away and scratch your head
with lightening bolts that shimmer
and strike the earth and the sky
and the glittering diamond waves
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and wander,
wander
as you ponder
how I look
the same from
all sides

(to your blind eyes unimaginative)
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or walk in awe
with leaping eyes
and hungry heart
marvelling how vast
is the territory and
how beautiful the land

Beyond the beyond

that you
just entered
into like
a child

with
eyes
opened
wide in
wonder
wriggles
harriet tubman

enters
into this
vast untrammeled life
and running from nothing
to the endless Something
of that great
ever Spring,
ever Autumn.
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Brain Trauma

Wow…so little known about it, such a huge and impactful issue.

I have brain trauma…and likely have had (very mild) Reactive Attachment Disorder since my inception.  That is not an official diagnosis, for Reactive Attachment Disorder is something very severe…certainly I have Early Trauma.

That makes me something called

“non neurotypical”.
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A neuro-typical person has a brain more like a Four-Square Ball…slap it around and it dohing dohing dohing bouncy bouncy back up to the next player no problem.

A non neuro-typical person has a brain that is like a finely fashioned delicate blown-glass globe. It is scary beautiful, capable of much…except that since most people’s brains resemble said Four-Square Ball, they take the delicate glass globe, call out SERVICE and slap it down to the ground…

…and when it doesn’t just bounce back up?

They get angry and blame the non neuro-typical person.

Whose brain is splattered/shattered on the cement and needs time and space and something…SOMETHING…to reset it, and that thing is never the same and often times never comes and the storm just has to be ridden out…the raging river rapids ridden, bashed from rock to rock and battered until it spits you out at the other side…
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It is awful…because as a non neurotypical I always feel so guilty…and I always feel like no one else receives the reality that I am trapped in. It feels like they think I am copping out and giving an excuse, having a built in alibi and justification…

…when the truth is during those times my brain aches and throbs and hurts and my mind feels like molasses-soaked cotton…and I have to work about a million times harder to just to be in my expected place.

When I was little, I used to walk around the house crying for no apparent reason, and according to the stories when I was asked what was wrong, I would wail “It’s the end of the world”…
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…that is how it feels.

Typical reaction of others is either some form of shaming that I am not “bucking up and coping” and that is accompanied with boasts of how that person bucks up and deals with it, and concluding with castigation to quit feeling sorry for myself and just move on.

just move on. wow. if only.

if only…moving on sounds wonderful.

There is another reaction that follows often as well…someone will get close, someone will feel some twinge of sympathy or compassion and choose to come close, seeing ONLY the outlands of this territory of hellish trauma…and they will say things that lead me to believe they will be present in the nightmare.

Until they get a few leagues into it…and realize this land is like the Marshes of the Dead that abutted Mordor.
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And WHOOSH…they disappear and brush out their tracks fast as they go…and I am accustomed to that and know how to cope with that. Cultivation of hobbies that can be done alone are therapeutic.

The last group though…they are the most onerous and dangerous. They are the ones who will not hear me when I ask them to please stop…please stop pushing me, please stop trying to help me in ways that are not helpful but are actually just all about them and their power-play (that they are totally unaware they are engaging in, as they see themselves as the great educator of the poor benighted and incapable person)…to them, they imagine I will fall to my knees sooo grateful that they deign to give me the off-scourings of their greatness.
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That group is the worst, because I know what happens to me…and I beg them to please stop because they push me too far and I snap inside my mind and all my abilities and all my capacities go into defending me from harm…and I am intellectually capable of abstract thought and I am quick to sense and perceive what others are trying to do and I can out-think them and out-argue them.

I go into defense mode, and I cannot stop. Not “I won’t stop”.

I cannot.
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I will observe every contradiction and throw it in their face. I will sense every inconsistency and challenge them about why they are trying to hold me to some things but not hold themselves to the same standard.

And those people? They leave finally, and usually bruised and hateful towards me because I hurt them…

…and I am the bad person, the unpredictable person, the inconsistent person, the unreliable person.

When in reality, my brain lies shattered on the playground pavement.

And then, the easy peasy low hanging fruit begins to beckon and croon…and the gender issue raises, and the tranny-freak thing sneaks in…their minds, my mind…it doesn’t really matter which by this point.

Sometimes I want to take spoons and go in thru my eyes and scoop my brain cavity clean and start fresh.

That, my friends, is what brain trauma does.  And by the way?  It can be traumatized by just about anything, really…the obvious culprit of war or tragedy…but it can be from bullying, it can be from the way our brain chemistry is, it can be from dysphoria…it can be from childhood events that were done without any bad intent but still resulted in trauma…

…and some brains can skate right thru things that traumatize other brains.Residues 2013_ADF
There is nothing to boast of if you are neurotypical…and there is no shame if you are not.

In the meantime, if you have a loved one who has trauma, be aware that PTSD is a real thing…

…for the traumatized person, from a neurological point of view, it is not just a memory.  The traumatized person experiences the events of the moment, but their brain is present in the midst of the actual trauma!

The brain that is traumatized is functioning in the midst of trauma even though the events in that moment may not actually be traumatizing…but soon do become so due to the brain functioning in trauma.  It adds itself to the pot of trauma, to the witches’ brew of horrors.

So that is the story of brain trauma.  For more information, google it.
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Reactive Attachment Disorder Summary

On Ghomeshi, Memory and Trauma

I simply have to press this…I am the victim of stories that intimate people tell about me that are lies.

Flat out.  They lie, because of many reasons, and I think all of the reasons are understandable:  my transition, their own cognitive dissonance, it’s easier to scapegoat me than accept that their life is the way it is as a consequence of their choices…it doesn’t matter why they lie.

I still love them, because I cannot do otherwise.  I am incapable of not loving them.  But the consequences of that lie are stunningly strong and toxic.

My only hope is that they come to their senses in a way similar to what happened here in this article.

************************************************************************************

Have you ever had a moment when you suddenly realize that your memory of an event is not actually what happened? A few years ago I was talking to someone about a pretty life-altering event that happened…

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Source: On Ghomeshi, Memory and Trauma

Me Moon

when you speak of me
you speak of weeds and brambles
thorns, nettles and stoney ground.

when you think of me
it’s craters and dark
and bare landscape stark
and lacking curves.
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I am gardens, moon, roses, sea.
I am me, in bowers and blooms
and labyrinth beds of unusual growth.
I am small trees and tall firs 
fragrance stirs, honey bees

I am Grace in the echo
of the moon’s deep wells
I am tides reaching and running
yearning and aching

I am reflected light
soft yet bright
sometimes yes often no
but always…always…
always aglow

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Please…think of what you know.

the endless ache of bones
the songs sung in your marrow
the shadow in your eyes
the light that holds your heart

think of who you know

vertigo
when gravity gives up
finally worn out
in my grave insistent
persistence at breathing.
tumblr_o46w3ckPYT1s93t2co1_540And why…yes, this is important
the why of me
dancing on desolation
rhyming in respiration
overthrowing tables of treason

and though it is dark,
it is not night, My Love,
no.
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it is the season of silence
that speaks, that sings
sings in me garden
sings in me moon
sings in me roses
sings in me sea
sings in me
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In The Midst of Ashes

I would make it again…knowing full well what lay ahead

Your Silence As Well

Your Silence As Well

Abandonment

This poem is one year old…I wrote it last year trying to deal with my worst enemy in this world.

I wanted to repost it, because frankly right now there is a great deal of uncertainty in my life…forces vie and swirl around me. People are easily inconsistent and squirt out in weak places…some vie for power, and some seek to judge from outside observation and have no clue about inside motivations…to give up power in deference to one who seeks it, only to have another assume that I am shirking my duties hurts me immensely.

I think most of those feelings are exacerbated by my old enemy:

Abandonment

You, long my nemesis and hater of my soul. You’ve chilled my days and frozen all my long night’s coal in hours of stark terror and silent desperate screams on razor blades I’ve la…

Source: Abandonment

Your Tragic Tranny Chalice (dedicated to Costco)

I was feeling fine, my day was good, and the sun shone outside.
As I walked the aisles looking for the stuff deemed so necessary
(after all, it HAS to be the Costco brand…cus KIRKLAND)
people smiled and we were soft on one another…

until I got to you, Checker, you with your fear become repulsion
become anger become hatred become revulsion become revenge
and your decision that I was a fraud and committing fraud
you who have let 5 ft tall dark skinned dark haired women
use the card of a nearly 6 ft tall blond norwegian woman
you who let half a dozen people use this common card,
the Holy Grail:  the Sacred Costco Card

and yet me, who most coincidentally and closely resembles the card holder
but happens to be trans, me…you choose to police.
And loudly, and publically and angrily, and relentlessly.

whoever you are, you hard hearted shrew, I hope you never feel the way I do
I hope it never happens to you, for it is worse than the underside of dog-vomit
which is about what you thought I was made out of, based on your words and tone.
and then when you called over the henchman to loudly flat out dehumanize
and disappear me into what you want me to be in…boxed in your word SIR
(as if sirs walk with flowers in their hair and flowing jewelry and trinkets and flair)

and everything inside that I was began to melt
it was your western version of acid in the face

thank you, Costco zombie of horror and hate.
you don’t even remember anything but
the spectacle of tears and your own sweet wine
of derision that you drank from my heart become your tragic tranny chalice

but I will never be able to forget, because your acid burns my face yet and still

and I don’t even know if anyone cared enough to hold you accountable
and that diminishes me further, becoming even more of no account or worth

may the Lord restore my heart and give again to me an unscarred face

RECongress “Transgender Lives in the Church” Talk (Transcript)

Wow.

This is one of the most amazing things I have ever read, and I cannot recommend it enough. Please please PLEASE take the time to read this.

Thank you Anna…brilliant and beautiful like you.

A Different End To The Story

All full of himself and stiff
gait wobbly, bopping up and down
walk waggly, blipping circley side-side
aggressive lean forward looking
for something to pierce, to rip

pent up all day inside the clothes of decency
but out now, unleashed now from the world of men
and striding like Colossus thru the realm
of women and children and all that rage
and self loathing his ticket to intoxication…
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just looking for a reason, a place
to vent…and vent that place, tear it
to shreds and bloody ruination plunging
his vicious teeth deep into soft innocent
flesh not yet on the planet 5 years.

He wore his privilege like porcupine quills.
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And then his tongue, bullwhip cracking
his pig eyes squinty and squealy and sweaty
and his anger was only surpassed
by his sanctimonious self righteousness
and utter unawareness of anything but himself.

And I?  Constrained by bonds of love and consternation
responsible for hearts and souls, and yes his own as well
I bit my fucking lip until it bled, and imagined
my nails raking his face to shreds
the way his words tore the heart

from my precious precious angels
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and here I sit, impotent work
with keyboard and words and tears
of sorrow, of ruination, of rage
and longing for the day when a man
won’t be such a dick.

I sit longing for a different end to the story.
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What Transmisogyny Is Like

It hits out of nowhere

It can strike at any time

It is hard to get back up afterwards
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We must protect rights of society’s marginalized | The News Tribune

We all have a responsibility to end sexual assault. Denying transgender people their civil rights is not the way to do that.

Source: We must protect rights of society’s marginalized | The News Tribune

A truly stunning well reasoned defense of my right to be.

Do you know that in most places transgender people are not recognized as who they are unless they have surgery…and at the same time the surgery is classified as “elective” and thus not covered by insurance…AND is also denied unless the person who needs the surgery obtains the permission and affirmation of 2 separate psychiatrists and surgeons?

Can you see that double bind?

“You are not a person unless you are committed enough to have surgeries…but we are gonna make you pay for them with your own money and they cost in the mid to high 5 figures…AND we are gonna make you prove yourself to at least 4 separate people…only then are you allowed to be a real person.

“Oh…and before you can even start this process, or get hormones or anything else, we are gonna require that you live as your claimed gender identity at least 2 years, after which we MIGHT give you hormones…

“What’s that you say? By requiring you to live as your claimed gender while denying you the means by which you can physically fit in we are endangering your life from transphobic transmisogynistic men? Well, you are wrong. WE are not doing that…YOU are…with your damn stupid insistence upon being a person who is differently bodied than you are gendered.”

You see the double bind?

It reminds me of how amateurism was created in sports to try and keep POC out of the leagues, because only the rich and privileged can live and train full time and not need to be paid, because they already have their money.

In the gender area…only the gender-rich and privileged can make the rules that shut us out.

And then we are told that our life matters, that we have worth, etc…just not enough worth to be made whole. Just not enough

another way of saying not enough is

worthless

And that is why it is important to let us go peepee like any other human…that is why it is important to speak of us as subjects (you/I/we/she/her) and not objects (it/that/he-she).

“That Is A She”

window
my home lies
deep in the forest
near the roots
of the mountains

it is a space
from which eternity
pours effortlessly
right alongside sorrow,
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longing and giving
and receiving,
that one unity
of space and going

to and from
that receptive deep
opening within
passing from
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this world of woe
to a deep place
that’s not a place
but the echo

of my home
deep in the forest
near the roots
of the mountains
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Fungus

i tried to explain
the majesty of mushrooms
who grow best in darkness
and thrive in the damp
and flourish midst breakdown
and live in the bullshit

but he just laffed derisive
and opened his wolfmouth
and said you are still
just a fungus
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Gravity That Rules

…perhaps this could be me.

Right now?  Sadly, it is still gravity that rules
and in times like these?

It’s hard to see
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I Am The OtHeR

they sit beside the brook
its merry song tinkles around them
music from the heart of
the earth’s blood clearer than diamonds
more fierce than oxygen
and all they hear is the sound
of piss bouncing off stones
and fouling the dirt
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in the presence of waterfalls
roaring with the immanent joy
of the void becoming UN-void
and spray like pearls on the way
from nowhere to as yet pregnant
oysters in deepest seas and
deeper sees
all they hear is a vague
annoying buzz of
an insignificant tramp.
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and at that shore vast
that shore that makes them
wistful, hopeful, weak, strong
in, out, shrinking, growing
never changing never same
and the thunder of the deep
calling to Deep
they cast their trash
and drop their gum
after taking my picture
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My True Name

the sun scurries from the rim
of the far horizon, hurries
up to its important stage above all
things beaming.
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it’s gonna have a helluva day
throwing shade at everyone
especially me, this moonchild
that sunshine passes thru.
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the sun forgets everything
but its self-important run
to heights to glare down from
imperious, impervious, and naming.
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I could look straight at it
but if I did, it would be quenched
in my knowing, darkling gaze,
my look that sees the backside
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so I look away as it names me
wrong, other, afterthought
aside, and that old flame would
just as soon burn my ass.
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but in just mere moments
when I lower my gaze, the sun
forgets I ever was, except maybe
to laugh and snicker at the moonchild
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but the moon remembers
and so do I
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the moon, soft, beautiful
receives me
knows my name

my true name
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That Line?

that line?
right there.

the one stretching out
from somewhere to nowhere

i crossed it
but not just stepped across

on dancing feet
i danced across

and caper on its grave

And Gold All Underneath

Behold, the darkness thick and lurking, growing
like ennui in my soul, in my heart doomed and waiting
in this long moment, seemingly forever
it will remain, this painted grey, this second…
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this minute is an hour is a decade
and I exist here…floating in the nothing, growing-shrinking…
it defines me as some-thing…no…as Some-one
whose breaking renders her unbreakable…
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The growing darkness lurking, insubstantial,
The river Ennui flowing out to nowhere, to everywhere
The shocking joy and wonder also shining, in
This painted grey, and gold all underneath.
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“Oh, you’re trans? But you look so good!”

What Cis People Say To Trans People Vs. What We Hear

“Oh, you’re trans? But you look so good!”







Rory Midhani for BuzzFeed News

Meredith Talusan is an LGBT Staff Writer for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.
Contact Meredith Talusan at meredith.talusan@buzzfeed.com.
Illustrator:  Contact Rory Midhani at info@rorymidhani.com.

Sanctuary– For JD

Remember Litter-Mate…the fact that they other and police you affirms your authenticity!!

 

City of Bones

Barcelona,
oh City of Bones
laying hot and dry in the sun
beating down on streets, on tombs
and tiles so red over white and so hot
and shimmering radiant still,
oh ye bones!
barcelona_above___revisited_by_coigach-d9h3eegBarcelona, City of Bones
Baking before the gates of the Sun,
I sacrificed my purity for thee, such as it might be
(my purity, not my sacrifice)

Purity…
of thought,
of mind,
of heart and soul,
purity of
song and deed
and strong intention.

Barcelona, my sacrifice
so droll, so dirty is actually
sterility masquerading
as purity and thus is merely

the absence of jazz,
the absence of spice,
the absence of that
jagged noise of exultation
and thus there is no
purity and nothing
quite acceptable
enough.
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Gladly do I lay it there
(my sacrifice, not my purity)
on the bony altar of your burning eyes
hung there above the freezing flames
of your sharp haughty sniff and thus
do I seek sanctuary in the fires of
your hunger, games appeased and satiated.
Image 002 And these words I leave
(my longing words so red, so sharp)
along the edge of your wet teeth,
hard teeth so white and glistening,
and there, blurred,

there they mingle
with your breath,
with the liquid you
and thus become
inflammable and ready
to leap up like the Phoenix
to take their ease in air and be
us, there, us there
be us there in the air.
Rise

And this city here,
right in plain sight and swaying
in the salty breeze blowing in stiff
off the racing aching blue seas,
this City of Bones dancing on air

with my words
there in air
like banners in the wind,
like thirsty golden kerchiefs
flying midst meteors, comets,
midst stars in the night

flapping in the solar flares
and furies of the sun and lapping
up the finest purest beams
of silver, argent grey moonlighttumblr_nw4iwesgqi1s2clnyo1_1280

And those fires
(of the night)
my words those silver fires
streaking, shooting across
the vast expanse of velvet
black thick nothing, silver flames
curling, licking at the bones
of the City hanging
in the deep dark void
shimmer And the music rounding there amidst
those handy banners sounds like owls
talking soft and hooty in the wind-torn branches
and our hearts are slender limber flexing long flagpoles
and we fly our flags of love like maidens flying
tokens for our champions…tumblr_o03sa8dubM1unv2uco1_1280Together we all

(words and banners and bones)

shine upon your battlements

Barcelona
City of Bones
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Feast Upon The Village Green

I am the bristly nest from which the great blue heron springs.
I am the stones upon which stinging ice-churned runnels ring.
And there, those fires hot from which the Phoenix rare takes wing.
I’m scintillating embers, coals ablaze and life giving.

They named me foul pale heretic and laid me down to rest,
outside the white-washed churchyard walls, outside their ruddy fold.
And there my hot blood flowed rich-red to feed their bloodless grass,
I deep red died upon that emerald sward of murder bold.
And I do let my bones peek from the curtain of my skin
and thus do I me nourish every living thing herein
with my authentic self and my unconquerable song,
my passion unquenchable and my me a sacred throng

of birth from death and life leapt up in winds, in rain and dew
I am nest, stone and embers singing always clear for you.
and thus it is unholy ground is cleaned, hallowed once more,
and every living thing’s communion, ever opened door
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The Lense Thru Which I Read My Lil Red Songbird…

I need my small, meaningless lies. I need all my self-created semi-truths.
It’s the only way for me to keep exclusive parts of myself to myself.
Believe me, I do not even perceive them as lies.
It’s something different that keeps happening inside my head.
At the same time, I long to tell you the truth about me, always.
I want to share with you each important or unimportant detail and feel and fully embrace the very act of sharing.
But it occurs to me that it’s the hardest of tasks; I hate it.
I hate unveiling bits and pieces of anything permanent or temporary that resides in me.
I loathe it with my heart.
You can find more honesty in the smallest of my gestures rather in my words;
my words are too impatient, too loose, too doomed in some way.
Anaïs Nin

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To EVERY Male Who Others/Polices Me

There Is One Thing Sadder…

when your history is called lies by liars…

“The saddest thing that can happen to a person is to find out their memories are lies.”
Juan Gabriel Vásquez

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Love At Knife Point

You
write
I love you
with your knife in my back
point point point point point point
bloody pinpricks and slashes
on my skin, in my heart
across my face in
careful cursive
curses

you
make
a mockery of
any love but self-love
which like Narcissus intoxicates
you obsesses you, captivates
you with yourself, and that
a pit of empty nothing
filled with
death.

You do
“Mean Girls” so well…
Are you a secret Broadway Agent
searching for locations to sell yourself
to Hollywood and pitch your script
as Lindsay or Tina?  Yeah,
TINA…Though Lindsay
has a certain
trashy
pull

as
your knife
throbs like a tattoo gun
that backfires and messes
your malformed middle with
toxic black hate and my
blood blows back in
your face
when
you
Love
At
Knife
Point
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