cloistered//poet

Trans(itioning). Remaking the self needs moonlight, whispered poetry, secret gardens, loneliness. Mid 30s. A quiet man. An angry woman. A non-binary that flinches too much.

[hel7l7]

I can't even find the pain under all this ANGER

[cloisteredpoet]

sometimes you have to live with being someone’s stepping stone. Sometimes someone hurts you and it wasn’t about hurting you but it also wasn’t accidental either—you were just the body that they were using as leverage to get where they want to go. You existed for a season in their life because you were useful to them & they loved you because they got something from you, and they hurt you because they got something from you and that was all you were there for. That’s all you were to them. And it hurts and it sucks and the only way forward is to let it hurt and let it suck and then let them go.

[cloisteredpoet]

I am so lonely for solitude. Social media can be such a crowd, and lately it feels like a disaster crowd, like the earthquake drills we had when I was a child; milling on the grassy field for hours, like the waiting room of a hospital when an hour ago you were certain this would only take fifteen minutes. Next to each other, on top of each other, that touch of mirror that other people shine on you by your awareness of them, except that it’s always there; never a moment to step away, to take a breath, to settle into your own home away from everyone else.

Since cellphones arrived we have complained about the creep of work as it bleeds and spills over into the rest of our lives, always on, always available, always a phone call away. But so has social life. Maybe it’s not that we’re all so lonely for each other, exactly, maybe it’s that we’re lonely for solitude, we’re lonely for the real sense of being alone. We can never start to connect because we don’t have a place to stop. It’s not a get-together if it doesn’t have a beginning or an end; then it is just that we are on top of each other, burned out by each other, so full of other people’s lives we’re lonely, lonely, lonely with it all.

[cloisteredpoet]

I haven’t logged into this tumblr in forever because this year just sort of felt like it broke me down. I don’t even remember the last time I tried writing poetry that was more than just a half-hearted attempt to pretend that I could.

[cloisteredpoet]

My poetry brain feels empty lately.

I’m telling myself that it’s okay.

I just keep noting down when an observation catches me.

I don’t commit it to a poem.

I don’t commit it to anything.

Raindrops on pebbles.

A girl in a corduroy hat.

An overheard line, “Otherwise occupied by cancer bullshit.”

None of it is a poem.

None of it may become a poem.

I see it.

I think a line.

I write it.

It’s all I can do right now.

[cloisteredpoet]

Let the day end, let the months go, let yourself marvel sometime at some marker of pain or hurt that long passed. Enjoy the forgetting. Even if it doesn’t feel good just yet, even if you still step forward through your days with uncertainty & trepidation. Enjoy the forgetting.

[cloisteredpoet]

Always makes me sad that after a decade of seeing how online queer & neurodivergent discussions go, I no longer bother to reply to anyone different than me who writes something that I relate to. I don’t bother telling them, “oh my god I use the same words for my own experiences” because I have no idea who will tell me that I *can’t* use those words, who will tell me “actually this is a uniquely x experience” no matter how much it rhymes, no matter how obviously similar it is. I’ll ‘make my own post instead’ rather than share in the connection & recognition with others that we managed to cobble together the same words & experience similar things, despite being strangers, despite have disparate lives.

It makes me wonder how many people read my own words & do the same.

[theprideful-deactivated20251201]

cis people will be like “gender isn’t real, only biological sex is i don’t have a gender” and then exclusively wear one kind of hairstyle so they don’t look like a different gender

[theprideful-deactivated20251201]

transphobes will act like gender abolitionists and then get angry when their son plays with barbies

[theprideful-deactivated20251201]

[cloisteredpoet]

What gets me every time is names.

Gendercrits & their associated transphobes are very insistent about refusing to use trans people’s names, even if it is their legal name. If they don’t know a trans person’s deadname, they might use even if the feminine or masculine version of that trans person’s name as though feminine or masculine versions of names are biologically real

Total gender abolitionists but don’t you dare use a ‘wrong sexed name’

[ratatoskryggdrasil]

Doron Langberg, Lovers, 2019

[nostalgic-suggestions]

some love languages

baking bread

pointing out cute dogs

fantasizing about escaping to the countryside together

poetry on walls

picking up each others typing styles

[nostalgic-suggestions]

love languages part 3 !

blurry photos taken mid laughter

running your thumb over their knuckles when you're holding someone's hand

reading a book someone mentioned, not necessarily to talk to them about it but just to understand them even a little better

writing lists for someone else

playing with their hair

[cloisteredpoet]

Get yourself a partner who thoroughly wears you out with pleasure & then as they’re leaving your room bows & says, “my prince, I bid you adieu”

[leave-her-a-tome]

Microdosing on writing by opening a google doc

[foxes-in-love]

[cloisteredpoet]

In my house it’s always, “you’re so kind, my love.” They respond, “I just love you.” & I say, “yes, exactly.”

[lifeinpoetry]

… I haven’t forgotten you, it’s just I’ve been distracted, between the sound of birds singing somewhere and this inability to keep any song left inside me from ruining everything, or so I tell myself, and like that, if not true as in provable, as in here’s proof, it’s true enough to believe in.

— Carl Phillips, from “Dangerous Only When Disturbed,” Then the War

[cloisteredpoet]

What gendercrits think no one has ever told trans mascs is fucking funny to me. Oh you’re gonna talk someone like me out of my dysphoria by telling me that Being a Girl Is Neat, Actually? Gee, no one has ever told me my reproductive organs are special & mystical & beautiful before! If only I had known, then surely I wouldn’t be trans—after all what a trans masc needs is *extra* reassurance that they’re feminine, right?????

I read their shit & then I’m like, yup, definitely got the dysphoria, and now I’m Extra Killing My Uterus, because the fucker might need a spiritual layer of death, too, thanks gendercrits

[ritikajyala]

There'll be a moment when you realise you're 27 when yesterday you were just 17; and you wouldn't be able to tell how a decade passed away and your life got divided into before and afters. The fury of youth will subdue and nothing will really change but everything will feel different when you look at old photographs and blurry videos taken on cheap mobile phones. Scents will remind you of childhood and certain friends you don't talk to anymore, hangouts will become reunions and mom's burnt pie will become the best food you ever had. And I know on some days you won't be able to show anything of those 10 years but I hope you remember to breathe, and let go of the knot in your chest. I hope you go out in the sun and live a little, because tomorrow is 37.

Edit- I added the visualizer for this piece on my YT, check it out here

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The Flesh I Burned