August 1, 2021

i don’t know how
i knew it was approaching
the end of july
but somehow didn’t remember
next comes august,
because as soon as i see the date
my stomach turns
and my heart palpitates
and i start worrying about the summer reading i only half finished
and the schedule i need to complete
and the downhill roller coaster snowball out of control truck
that is
School.

even though it was only public school that started in august,
and i haven’t even been enrolled in a school for eight and a half years,
there’s a trauma that’s associated with
the educational system here
and it teaches us more
about how to be uncomplaining drone workers
than anything critical thinking
enjoyment of learning
sort of thing

and any amount of years of higher education
won’t help us recover
from 12+ years
of…that…

and i do call it a trauma,
though nothing about it was grossly traumatic,
because if your body reacts to a thing as a trauma
it is.

~~~

don’t know if i want to be so dramatic as to post that
implication and bias and only a half-way understanding of how our american educational system was actually built
but i do believe my therapist when she tells me that if something feels like trauma in your body, it is,
because our bodies often know more about what’s happening than our brains
which is why sometimes it’s an easy coping mechanism
to divide ourselves from our physical selves
to avoid that confrontation, that knowing,
in order to simply survive one day, one hour, one minute, one second at a time…

~~~

i would watch a movie/tv show
about a villain
who truly believes they’re the hero
and everyone around them insists they are,
they have state of the art gadgets and mentors
[which my autocorrect changed to monsters]
telling them where to fight, and whom,
and they go about their time fully believes they are doing good,
for a solid 7-8 years they feel they’ve done such good
and then, for whatever reason, they have all their gadgets and things taken away,
as well as a fair amount of their people,
but with less people insisting on their heroism,
and more interaction with the world as it really is,
they start to suspect they’ve been the villain all along,
and they get into an artistic expression as a form of therapy
to understand the awful things they’ve done
and they begin to represent the people they’ve hurt
in said artistic endeavor
as a healing,
and though they don’t expect their own personal healing will help the families of those they’re representing,
they try to raise money
(as they are still in the public eye)
to help those families.
a roller coaster ride of a hero/villain/citizen story
a true story of redemption
a cautionary tale of only listening to those on your side
(and of blindly going into the ‘family business’)
and obviously not inspired by any real person or story in our country or society
at all.

July 31, 2021

thirty days have september,
april,
june,
and november
all the rest have thirty-one
except february which completely fucks us up and every four years gets even a little bit more complicated because time is a mortal construction and probably not as linear as people make it out to be…

i see my friends
open themselves up to the universe
to give and receive and the universe complies
sending platonic connections from years and years past,
sheltering under iridescent wingspans
and holding safe a space for baby queers;
we are the ancestors we wish we’d had
(and we do have those ancestors,
they just may not be blood)

the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb
isn’t it great how the actual saying is saying the opposite of what everyone who says it thinks they are saying?
there are a lot of things like that in this world, aren’t there?
(and do we even need to live our lives by sayings made up by humans long since dead?)

i’m still finding my way
slowly opening myself up to the universe,
trying not to ask it too greedily,
as i’m still scared it’s not real,
i’m too much of an atheist/agnostic to trust in anything outside of myself
(but, one might point out, the universe could simply be a part of ourselves that is unknown,)
and we are far more connected to one another than we think we are,
so maybe those connections are the universe
and each other are the spiritual guides,
but all of these are very ‘what if’
very potential answers
but not definites,
and it is too early for this kind of contemplation to make 100% sense
(and i was definitely up too early to be too comprehensible to others)
so we can just write this
and post it
and throw it out into the universe
and know that our place in it is constantly changing
and at times you need the guidance
and at others you are the guide
and it constantly changes
and change is good
scary
but good.

July 8, 2021

what is with
these weeks of summer
streaming by in the goddamn blink of an eye?

(and how many more will i have have have to endure
until i finally find it in me to accept
the inevitability of time?)

July 1, 2021

the first
of any month
scares the crap out of me

i’m so much more able to ignore
the steady, streaming, passage of time
if the dates just keep flowing.

but the reset,
the sudden jump back to single digits,
the shock to my system as i readjust…

write new dates,
set new goals,
pay new bills,

(does it never end?)

~~~

you’d think
for someone who has new years in their top favorite holidays
new beginnings wouldn’t hurt so damn badly

~~~

poetry about something real
(kind of like prose)
flows out of me smoothly,
effortlessly,
the words coming even without me pondering them
the appearance on the document
pristine
and as i go
i think more and more
and harder and harder
and second guess
and try to have a nice ending
(are poems made for tidy endings?)
and i fizzle,
or overanalyze,
and what started as a journey
ends in near virtual reality

can my poems ever truly reflect
what’s happening
in my brain?

May 29, 2021

the never-ending trap
of Time
growing up it seems to go by so slowly
long summer nights
endless school days
waiting for santa claus
waiting to perform
waiting to hear back about important news
but somewhere around teenage years
it starts to slide
and no longer is there more time than you know what to do with
but it starts downhill and seems to snowball
out of control
days slip past you in the blink of an eye
(how has it been a decade since i went to college?)
and especially for someone like me
who has very little tracking in my internal clock about time
who could easily talk to a best friend from years gone by
and just be excited that we have even more life stories to talk about
it’s hard to quantify
where those years all went
because to me
they seem
to just
be…

gone

May 1, 2021

i felt like
two days ago
i was worried it was close to the end of the month
then i found out
it wasn’t even the 20th yet
and today, today it’s the beginning of May
and my sense of time hasn’t been this off
since the beginning of the Global Patrick Stewart
last year
(over a year
ago
now)
and i have to wonder
if my sense of time is off
or if i just looked at the calendar wrong
or if time is a myth
and a mortal construction
and any feelings of ‘shoulds’
within the constraints of
‘time’
are all a product of capitalism
which in itself is a product of white supremacy
and we should be dismantling it all,
right?

April 28, 2021

i ache for more time
to go backwards
to have a do-over

but when i write dates
i am far more likely to write in
a future date
one 2-3 days from now

and i wonder if that means i’m forever looking back
or forever looking forward
or that time is a never-ending, non-linear cycle
(or that maybe i shouldn’t think about things/write dates when i’m tired)