April 5, 2022

it’s so easy for me to fall
in love
head over heels
dramatically
[platonically]
asking for your heart
opening myself up to let you in
welcoming all of you
beauty
faults
talents
salt
my compassion
for your passion
is limitless

but the minute someone says
‘i’ve made a place for you
in my heart,
please come and tell me
of your dreams and nightmares,
your goals and your regrets,
i want to know all of you
i welcome all of you,
beauty
faults
talent
salt…’

i feel the air
absent
instantaneous

my figurative feet frozen
flipping from fight to flight
forever
heart pounding
knees shaking
voice quaking

why can’t i just let myself,
my already fully opened self,
receive what i’ve already given?

why am i always at a precipice
of giving myself over
surrendering myself to others
and never taking that necessary
step/leap/plunge?

i want to
so badly,

but my entire nervous system
screams against it.

so that the minute i take
the minutest step
towards letting someone
see
me—

the minute they don’t follow
100% of my expectations—

i use that as proof
that i never should have trusted in the first place
and that adds one more minute
on the precipice
between giving and receiving,
loving and pushing away
trusting and unjustly feeling so betrayed
that already the freeze feels like an eternity…

someday

it will be

March 28, 2022

i really don’t know what i’m doing.
my only post-secondary education
in poetry
was over a decade ago
and i can’t really remember
anything i learned
(granted, that’s probably from
all the trauma/trauma responses
i was experiencing
at the time),
but i digress…

i feel like my skills
with words
would improve
if i could just
Remember
those words.
i often know exactly what i want to say,
and that there is a word
that’s perfect,
but i can’t for the life of me
remember it.
or i know what to say
and i also suspect
there’s an even better word
that would fit the scheme/
rhyme/alliteration/pattern
better than what i have down already
and the harder i try to think
the better i understand
all those analogies
of holding sand
in tightly grasped hands
the desperation
erases
all sense of
every word
i’ve ever known.

so that’s why my poetry
is a little
imperfectionistic,
a little
‘flying by the seat of my pants’,
a little
self-aware/meta/laughing at my own poems,
because otherwise
the grasp would be even tighter
and the only remaining
grain
of sand
would be that of my name

(and even that
i don’t always remember
right away)

March 23, 2022

working from what is best
best for me
best for my brain…

there are dozens (hundreds?) of poems
that never got to see the page of day
the poetry blog where all these have run off to
and some of them, yes, they are simply me
trying to wake myself up
vibe myself into the rest of the day
figure out what in the heck
my brain
is even doing
at any given moment

but some are
objectively
*good*
they just didn’t fit with the other poems for that day
or they’re too personal
and i just
cannot
i can’t have that out in the world
at least not on the inter-webs.

it’s like
i’m still that open book
with pages ripped out
and stuffed in my back pockets
or otherwise eaten
digested
you’ll never see them

(and it still surprises
even me
what things i’m willing to be so open about
and what i’m not,
and i think it has a little bit to do with what’s still affecting me
hardcore
and what makes sense to affect me
this hard
this long;
and
yeah
that’s all

[i was going to give examples
but like i said
already digested])

~~~

the blank toe tag
waves in the
non-existent breeze
hanging off of our
plastic skeleton
(named Barnaby)
and i know that there probably is a breeze
it’s probably the hot air from the radiator
just beneath
but still
i like to imagine
ghosts
messing with our deathly decoration aesthetics
as if to say
‘it’s/we’re
closer than you think!’

~~~

i feel like i could turn that first poem
into something more,
something bigger,
literally
solely
from that last stanza
there is a pace and flow and rhyme and feel
that gives slam poetry
that gives life to the creative in me
that gives me reason to keep going
to keep flowing
to maybe not post that today
but to perfect it
and bring it back
(or
who says i need to refrain from posting
in order to play?)

(fuck it, let’s post all three)

February 17, 2022

don’t be scared,
be you.
don’t be safe,
be you.
don’t overthink,
trust your instincts,
be you.

this seems like positive,
encouraging,
enlightening
advice

on the surface

but then my
[overthinking]
brain
turns it all on its head
again

aren’t the scared/
safe
parts
part of me,
too?
is it just another
nature vs. nurture?
how i was born
vs.
what the trauma turned me into?

what do i do

who can i be?

i contain multitudes

it’s why acting

so why can’t i trust the multitudes
within me?

trust

let go

surrender and embrace

February 15, 2022

a therapy appointment
a good ‘vamlumtimes’
and a cbd night’s sleep
and i’m feeling ever so slightly better today
than i was yesterday
morning

i’m still a little on
the stuck side
a little on
the slower side
a little on
the i don’t know what to write or if i’ll ever really want to write again
side

but

there is a whole day ahead of me
and instead of seeing it as a negative,
as an entire,
bleeding,
long
ass,
gooddamned
day,
i would like to see it as an opportunity;
not necessarily to get things accomplished
(but that would be nice if that happened)
but to get to do things
i want to do

(don’t know what that might end up being
but i’ll do it
!)

~~~

a therapist once told me
to listen to my body,
to let my desires direct my day

that would be great
if
i knew what my body was trying to say…

~~~

when i tell stories
for the first, second, third times
i am testing out wording,
making sure the way i tell the story
in the future
(the memorized-like-a-monologue version)
is the best one,
the most truthful,
the one that elicits the best response.

but sometimes,
when i tell stories that are more than stories,
explorations of trauma,
a tale of something that impacted me
hugely,
i tell it in such a way that,
in observing myself,
i can tell i’m telling it
in order to understand
how i feel about it.

(because, if nothing else, i sure know how to intellectualize)

January 31, 2022

it’s about to be
That Time:

February.

in a non-leap-year,
February and March
have the same date attached
to the same day of the week,

and this messes me
the fuck
up.

i’ve missed more appointments
than i care to admit
scheduling them for February
when i thought i’d scheduled them for March,
and more than a few
shown up too early
seeing the day and the date come up
in the second month of the year
just to have them actually be
in the third.

i know ‘reading the date more carefully’
is a way around this,
but sometimes my eyes see
exactly what they want to see
instead of what is

(and especially within this
year three
of a global porcupine ,
where concentration is lacking
in most of us
due to collective trauma
observed
[directly or indirectly]
day in
and day out
and day in
and day out
and my only saving grace
last year
was that nothing needed to be scheduled
during these months;
resurgences,
and my own clumsy injuries,
and the cold outside,
and my own seasonal depression…
i hid through most of the winter,
hibernated the initial instance of
‘Tuesday the first’
away)

but
i’m trying to be more proactive
more energized
more engaged
this year
so i’ll read
and re-read
and re-re-re-read
and have my spouse check
the dates of things
(or just not schedule anything
non-consistent
at all)
(i mean, hey,
there’s a reason i scheduled my booster
for today,
the last day in January,
a date i won’t even see
for another
fifty-nine
days)

and maybe
just maybe
this therapy
of breathing
and taking my time
and forgiving myself
my past errors
is [could be] helping?

October 16, 2021

the trauma was not good;
no amount of “things happen for a reason” will change that,
it was unfair, unfathomable, wildly wrong.
but how i choose to deal with the trauma,
how i have survived thus far,
and how i choose to keep on going,
that is where the beauty lies.

and i can adjust my own coping mechanisms;
make them healthier, make them stronger,
for nothing is truly “good” or “bad”
“positive” or “negative”
but there are healthier and not so healthy,
things that help me access my emotions
and perform acting in a real, vulnerable, and honest way,
and that is how i choose to keep going
(start going? this is technically all new to me…)

and, similarly,
there is no “recovered” vs. “not recovered”
there is in recovery and the levels therein.
but one level does not disappear once you move on to the next
they are uneven steps existing in a labyrinth
that sometimes require backtracking to continue on.
and if i can look at my own mental health
in a way
that is
Non-Binary
(just like me!)
then maybe,
just maybe,
i can make friends with my trauma
(and how i felt it initially/since)
and understand a little bit more about me
in the aftermath…

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.

May 27, 2021

why is it that
when i was so young
(and looked like a baby)
i felt so damn old,

and why is it that
now that i’m older
(though i still look a bit young)
i feel like a baby?

(i actually know the answer to this:
it’s the trauma.)

May 6, 2021

it’s ok
it’s ok
it’s ok to not write a poem just yet
about reframing the story
around death
to create closure.
this is ok
to sit with
in your heart
for a while
just you and your
thoughts/memories/emotions/
stories
living each day,
getting to know how to live
with closure
(even if it feels fake at first)

i know you don’t feel like you deserve
closure
acceptance
to go on
but remember
you were just a kid,
a damn kid,
it doesn’t matter if you think
every child is ‘truly innocent’
or not
they are children
their brains are not fully developed
they don’t know how to fully deal
with death
you
were just a child
your
brain was not fully developed
you
didn’t know how to fully deal
with death
with all that death
that loss
it doesn’t matter if you think you deserve closure
now
don’t you think you,
child you,
eleven and fifteen year old you
deserve some sort of
closure?
acceptance?
healthy relationship with self?

something?