autmnbrzambrsky

🍁🍂🌊🌈🧣 an ex christian writing poems about atheism until I have enough to publish a collection :)

[autmnbrzambrsky]

I looked up at the sky and asked

What am I to witness the grace of spontaneous arrangements? Who am I to be feeling among the emotionless eternity which shines so great before me?

The universe looked back at me and said that *I* was good.

That I am great among the heavens because I love worlds that do not love me back.

Because I am just as eternal as the vastness. From the dirt I am born of atoms and to the rock I shall return.

I am irrevocably celestial.

I was formed in the belly of a star

My cosmic mother

Who bore me with no pains

No agenda of her own

The universe loves me because I am but a bit of her, and I do love myself.

- autmnbrzambrsky

[autmnbrzambrsky]

After all this

That Still Small Voice

Haunts me

She says each time

The worth of a woman is her hair

The length she has gone

Without shearing her power

Untouched

There is not honor in indulgence

For the long-haired woman

But in denial

Of each trimming

- autmnbrzambrsky

[autmnbrzambrsky]

The first time

I was to be baptized

I was told no

She is not ready

The burden is on the heavy yoke

Her heart is not quite open

The last time I was baptized

Spirit was the water

Drowning me with YES

She said to me

You are always the sacrifice

Pierce your heart again for me

- autmnbrzambrsky

[autmnbrzambrsky]

Pain is a virtue

Virtue is a race

Races have no winner

When you’re all seeking last place

For the last in the race

Shall be first in their pain

There is no salvation

If hurt’s all you gain

- autmnbrzambrsky

[laxsara-deactivated20210802]

the meaning of life is summed up in the story elmer bendiner tells about how when he was a pilot the second world war, his plane was hit with a barrage of anti-aircraft fire from the nazi forces but the crew survived. and how everyone was saying it was a miracle until they investigated the shells that got in the fuselage and found there was no explosive charges in any of them. in one they found a note scribbled in czech, written by the person who had been forced to manufacture the shells, and it just said ‘this is all we can do for you now’.

[laxsara-deactivated20210802]

every time i see someone acting tough online about how harm reduction is pointless and in some convoluted way worse than doing nothing i think about that person in some soul-destroying nazi factory in occupied czechoslovakia removing all of the explosive charges from their anti-aircraft shells and writing a note that they must have known would probably never be read, just to say ‘this is all we can do for you, and we’re going to do it’. they are trying to make us kill you and we refuse. i do think that maybe it’s all going to be okay.

[dimir-charmer]

Girls will be like Idk why im so unproductive recently and then you ask whats going on in their life and they list eight lifestopping crisies and then say 'yeah but i should be fine :/ '

[autmnbrzambrsky]

It’s me I’m bitches

[musings-of-a-prodigal]

That feeling of being so completely alone, even when you're surrounded by other people. The jokes other queer people make online about how their entire friend group came out, one by one. And all you can do is just burn with jealousy.

You were always the funny one, the weird one. Now you're also the token heretic, the token gay one, but you make enough jokes at your own expense to ease their discomfort. It's always about their discomfort, never the churning pit of your own. You're too afraid that they'll leave you to prioritize anything other than their comfort. You make yourself marketable, palatable, "one of the good ones," because being lonely is still better than being alone.

You wish, oh so desperately, that you had been a little less devout in middle and high school when you were making these core friendships. You wish your parents had just sent you to public school. You wish you could rebuild your entire self, your entire past, so you wouldn't be hurting like this now.

You wish you didn't care about them so much, that you could just move on from this group of cishet Christian girls you've known for half your life. But you do care about them, and they care about you, even though you've changed so much they don't even know how to relate to you anymore.

You listen to them discussing their Bible studies, their godly boyfriends, all while you can't even walk into a church anymore without shaking. They tell you they accept you, that they love you just as you are, but you can't help but remember every homophobic remark they have ever uttered in your presence.

And you can never tell them all of this, because they could never understand. They'd be offended if you told them how the doctrine of original sin taught you to hate yourself. They'd be uncomfortable if you actually talked about the girls you liked. Your innermost being is too much for them.

You're too much for them.

[hereticcoyote]

i always felt so guilty for not having these intense spiritual experiences during worship

id sing along with everyone else and try to feel it, id walk in the woods and marvel at god’s creation without a single bit of actual emotion

i think id convinced myself i did feel it, that the soul-lifting, fire-lighting gratitude to god was lying dormant within me and i just had to tap into it

but to this day all ive ever really felt is fear.

[andromedaslover]

so many christians love to label apostates and heretics as these cold-blooded people who left christianity because of their own hate or whatever. i cried for hours on end the day i realized there was no longer anyone who knew exactly how many hairs there were on my head. 

leaving christianity is not a moment of “i now hate god because i was not given everything i wanted”; leaving christianity is like being forced to turn your back on a parent who has loved you but has also abused you. you shed so much negativity and self hatred and guilt but you also lose so much love. it’s terrifying and cold and empty and i would not be doing it had i not been forced to. 

[freedomisdojaja]

make sure you do

[worm-on-a-stringe]

people talked about purity in youth group as if it meant anything. i sat there trying my damn hardest to feel any kind of pure. i felt nothing.

and you know what? i wasn't pure at all. my brain was stuffed with other people's fears and prejudices. there wasn't space for me in my own head.

i feel pure now though. i am one hundred percent me and nobody can ever change that

[seraphimfall]

wearing a rosary during sex? yes.

absolutely nothing better than appropriating the pretty parts of a bastard religion and looking hot as hell the entire time.

[recovering-catholic]

[sacrilegy]

anyways u know what. i love not believing in a god. i love appreciating the world as it is and i love loving other humans without strings attached. it’s so sexy of me.

[dykecostanza-deactivated2024112]

even if billie joe was straight (he’s not) teenagers getting offended he used the word faggot in american idiot 16 years after the fact would still be some of the goofiest discourse i have yet to see on this website. if you were young and gay in 2004 that shit rocked your world bc we were living through one of the most powerful resurgences of blind american patriotism and anti-gay evangelical bullshit of the last three decades. i dont think most of yall understand how radical that song, that album, and green day’s overall anti-bush pro-gay stance was for the time. even though we were at the cusp of bush becoming unpopular by the time it was released, american idiot saw a fairly mainstream rock band condemning not just him, but the bigoted, ignorant american culture which created him. to remove all of this context from the song and act like green day was just throwing around homophobic slurs for the hell of it is exactly why people joke nobody has reading comprehension on this website lmao. he’s not weaponizing the term; he’s using it to identify with an alternative american society.

[star-anise]

The lyric is:

Well maybe I'm the faggot America

I'm not a part of a redneck agenda

I don't know how to explain to kids these days what it was like to be young and queer in those days. People think I call myself queer because I've never lived in a small and homophobic town, never experienced violence or discrimination, don't know what it's like to have those words thrown at me with anger and hatred.

And it's hard to reach through the pain of those memories and say: there were no words for us that weren't slurs when I was your age.

I was 17 when this song came out. "Gay" was what the boys in my high school called anything they didn't like. "Pop quiz? That's so gay!" A (straight) girl in the drama club shaved her head for cancer and people started calling her a dyke. Her car got egged in the school parking lot and the eggs stayed there long enough to wreck the paint but somehow "nobody saw". The teachers and principal of my Catholic school didn't do anything about that, or about the abuse my gay friend put up with in the halls and every class except drama, because intervening would be "endorsing homosexuality." My gay friend got shipped off to conversion therapy by his family and I never saw him again. Conservative classmates tried to get the drama teacher fired, because she "wasn't supportive of Catholic values."

The only story I knew about gay people in a town like mine was The Laramie Project, about Matthew Sheppard's murder for being gay in a small town in Wyoming. That was the year I started but couldn't finish a play titled "The Lemon Tree" about two girls whose love for each other couldn't survive the homophobia of a town like mine, the same way a lemon tree planted there would be killed stone dead by its harsh winters. It was the year I decided to convert to Catholicism, because I had sincere faith and yes the Church was homophobic but having a real relationship with a woman was never going to be possible for me anyway so it wasn't like I was losing anything, right?

I didn't have access to the gay community or gay media, except through online slash fandom. A year later I found a second depiction of gay people in a town like mine: Brokeback Mountain, about two men whose love was smothered by society's homophobia until one of them was murdered for being gay.

(Now I know that kd lang and Tegan and Sara were openly gay in the 90s and come from my part of the world, although they all had to leave to be successful. Nobody mentioned kd lang's sexuality, and Tegan and Sara didn't get radio play here when I was young.)

And yes, "faggot" was worse than "gay". "Gay" just meant, you know, "bad", but "faggot" meant gay and soft and weak and about to get an ass-kicking.

So I remember those lines and when I first heard them all those years ago. I remember that I was cleaning my room and listening to the radio, and the DJ talked about Green Day's anger at cable news and the war in Iraq and played the song, and those two lines hit me, so hard I was incredulous and couldn't believe that for once somebody was on my side.

Green Day's image was tough and angry and loud, and it's an angry song—not unexpected, basically anyone left-leaning was angry about politics then—and them saying "maybe I'm the faggot" was them saying Come and get me. You can't scare me. This thing you throw out as an insult and a threat? Yeah, I'll own it, and I'll use it to lure you into punching range. You're wrong and I can fight you and win.

It was like a transmission from an alien planet. This was someone so much braver than I could ever imagine being. What that song said to me was that somebody was willing to stand up for me. I had viewed homophobia as an all-powerful cultural force I could either submit to or escape by hiding until I found a safe community, but pro-LGBT punk rock was what taught me that I also had the option to fight.

[magdaliny-deactivated20191030]

“In college I had a physics professor who wrote the date and time in red marker on a sheet of white paper and then lit the paper on fire and placed it on a metallic mesh basket on the lab table where it burned to ashes. He asked us whether or not the information on the paper was destroyed and not recoverable, and of course we were wrong, because physics tells us that information is never lost, not even in a black hole, and that what is seemingly destroyed is, in fact, retrievable. In that burning paper the markings of ink on the page are preserved in the way the flame flickers and the smoke curls. Wildly distorted to the point of chaos, the information is nonetheless not dead. Nothing, really, dies. Nothing dies. Nothing dies.”

— Nicholas Rombes, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (via bobschofield)

[donttouchmyasymptote]

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.

(Aaron Freeman, “Planning Ahead Can Make A Difference In The End”)

[autmnbrzambrsky]

Great Are You

It’s MY breath in MY lungs

My bones sing a song of greatness alright

My heart cries it’s praise

To the life and love within it

Restored

autmnbrzambrsky