artsy fruitcake performative male

26, any pronouns, genderqueer, poet from STL @grabyourhatphotography is where i do visual art

[everestwritespoems]

Given to the Sky That Made Me

When I was twenty-two,

my body changed

from merely a vessel

that puts a face to my name,

to a world out of bounds,

where even I found myself

trespassing.

I wanted to finish the job

by giving myself once more,

to someone stronger than me,

who would rape the land, and

terraform my heart

to one that is no longer

bleeding.

But there was no one

to patch up the holes therein.

Why did I even try to

find someone so cruel and

so willing?

With no choice remaining,

I could take control and

give up my body

to the sky that made it.

If I send myself back to the stars,

will I be with Ursa Major?

Will my hands turn to claws?

Will my cry turn to roars?

If I do it just right,

will I be tossed to a world

where every body has

the same scars as mine?

[everestwritespoems]

Little boy a bug

with a need to

be seen so small,

to be pitied and

crushed under your weight,

desperate under your boot,

your sole like the

sky, a world onto

its self I can

be a part of,

to be seen as

delicate and incidental, a

stain on the wall

smacked into your reality,

splattered like paint, a

color only to be

wiped away or covered

up or ignored. See

the crushed organs of

my tiny body inanimate,

a fixed point in

your universe, a fixed

event in time, forgotten.

You will see me

for what little I

am and see me

for nothing more than

what I was. I

was yours to take.

Yes, I was yours.

[everestwritespoems]

A Lot to Fill

You are the closest thing I have to you.

Grabbing desperate handfuls,

each one a memory

from a past life we both lived.

Somehow we know how to look at each other.

Your gaze cuts like a lightning bolt.

I can already feel your heat.

I defined myself as

a body in love.

But there's a lot of nothing inside.

A lot to feel missing,

a lot to fill.

I get lost in the

wilderness of your mouth,

climb a mountain that I know

I won't climb down.

We will never touch

for more than a second

at a time.

Love is still here for now, but

there is no home they won't strip bare.

[everestwritespoems]

Fixed

My grip tightens slightly

in anticipation of the slow

lurch into an empty roundabout,

'til into view comes a

sleek sliver of black,

a small car slowly revealed,

almost as if slipping out from

another plane, or

stretched out

from a magician's mouth.

I watch the car begin to circle,

crawling

like a worm, entrails

lagging then catching

up to the head.

Finally, I see him,

the driver,

head turned exactly

90° to the right,

fixed impossibly still,

as is his expression impossibly

blank, impossibly

unchanging, a still image

moving further into my view.

But I don't think

he's really there

at all.

Our eye contact feels like

stagnant water,

glazed over.

Fixed, myself,

gripping tighter, I

watch him pull forward, inch by

inch crawl, rate unmeasurably slow,

somehow moving

in a perfect circle

without ever

turning the steering wheel, hands

10 and 2, possibly

one with the wheel, like

they grabbed on one day and

never let go,

letting the

leather grow into flesh

like

burrowing fungi.

Hours pass, he makes a lap.

Then days, too, pass, as

his car stretches around again

and again. I am, or

we are

still alone.

I am sitting in a pool of piss and

stool. The

muscles of my foot,

still tensed down onto the

break, give out and

let go. My wheels

fall forward, just a centimeter, but

I pause and

slam the breaks, again.

A dense cloud of moths

fling kamikaze into my

windshield, pressing down harder

than their exoskeletons can handle,

oozing out of their bodies onto the

glass. They begin to seep

into the car like condensation, as if

they found the space between the

nucleus and shell and filled

in the cracks, caulking the space

between me and them,

or it.

The windshield shatters,

each shard ripped away

like into a tornado.

And with the glass goes the light.

All of the light around me,

replaced, in equal exchange,

by liquid moth, that becomes

light, becomes

air,

breathed into my lungs,

a bitter slime that coats my throat,

my eyes stung by the

pitch black.

Again, the car lunges and

stumbles forward, and

into the roundabout I turn,

unable to see, only feeling.

Feeling the crash,

a crash that repeats

one million times per second,

over and over.

Crashing into

what I don't know,

nor does it seem

important to.

I feel the world turn

and turn and turn and turn and

turn and turn and turn,

turn 'til I'm compressed into a

fixed

singular point

and

stop.

My grip tightens slightly

in anticipation of the slow

lurch into an empty roundabout.

[everestwritespoems]

Meetcute

When did my name become an alias?

At some point I stopped giving it freely.

It always provided just a glimpse,

but that glimpse became hazier,

like a memory that fades with each remembrance.

There is power in refusal

and in anonymity.

Speaking my name is my shield,

avoiding your gaze is my weapon.

Perhaps there is power in cowardice.

Call it bravado.

Like the mountain.

Yes, like the mountain.

Hiding in plain sight, like the mountain.

Maybe I am the mountain,

maybe I have been moulded by corrosion,

maybe I am littered with corpses.

Do you deserve to be one of them?

If you are an explorer,

I will the wind to rock your ship.

Not to tip over but to turn away from me.

I will steer if you refuse to,

I will be the waves to carry you away if you need it,

I will carry you in my arms back home,

tenderly, almost an act of love.

In this lifetime we are destined strangers.

I am not to bare your flagpole,

I am not your burial ground,

I am not romantic,

I am not brutal.

Perhaps I am a mountain,

but to you I am just another hill.

[everestwritespoems]

When You Believed in Me

I don't have feelings anymore,

I just have thoughts.

I don't want to think about you anymore.

I don't want to remember you,

but every time I see your face,

I see it staring back at me,

but I just can’t meet your eyes.

I remember when you believed in me.

I can be in two places at once

and still be nowhere at all.

I'm a paper town on the map to your heart.

I'm a coward for staying alive,

but what if when I die,

the part of me that I wanted to kill survives.

[everestwritespoems]

Keeping a Stranger

I've greeted with surprise and some bewilderment a stranger at my door with scruffy facial hair,

young,

beaming a smirk.

Had him come to me twice,

this second time more bashful,

this time more shy,

tail between his legs,

a real aw schucks who me give me one more chance sonofabitch.

I'm letting him stay again.

I guess he does belong here.

We look at each other in the mirror,

an echo of each other's echo.

He is a photo of a painting of a sketch someone drew of me.

I hear him jerking off in his room just about every day, like he's still a teenager.

Apparently there's something that still needs to come out,

but sometimes I just think he gets off on his own masculine artifice.

Somewhere inside of him, though,

I see this delicate flower,

but I'm not exactly sure where it's growing from.

There's something untraceable about him.

It's in the way he talks.

Something about his affect is so queer.

I don't know that it registers to most,

but I can tell that he can tell.

He's a little off.

Sometimes I think he might be a ghost,

and I think that ghost might be my ghost.

We haunt a house with good bones.

That's what they say, anyway,

that my house had good bones to it.

Every couple of years I get real close to bringing the whole place down,

like a chiropractor breaking someone's spine,

but I don't know where else to live.

Or haunt I guess,

I'm still working that detail out.

Someday this house will be a home,

and we will haunt it all the same,

and whoever dares to live here again

might stare at a stranger in the mirror

and say "well I think I know you as well as I know myself"

and welcome her in,

with her tail between her legs

and a handful of flower pedals

clutched tightly.

[everestwritespoems]

When I Grow Up

I want to be an artist when I grow up,

when I am free of suffering,

when fallout salts the soil,

when pigs fly.

I want to be a poet on my death bed,

finally free of whatever it was that was holding me back all those years.

I want to end a beginner.

I want my last words to be a first draft.

I want to wake up the next morning, shake my head, and wonder what the hell I was thinking when I wrote them.

I want to wake up at the gates of heaven remembered for nothing.

I want a low impact.

I want to break up in the atmosphere.

Any trace left of me will one day be swallowed by the sun,

but why wait?

I'm not sure that I have that much time.

[everestwritespoems]

Groundhog Day, but You're Ceaser Falling in Love

Day one:

The blade that never leaves the hand,

the hand that always shakes.

Puncture and bate breath and,

suddenly, a cloud of stars that wreaths you,

the halo of a spilled paint saint falling to

a fresh red ground.

Body just another raindrop,

just another made like a leaf to fall,

just another to be swept away.

Day twelve:

Do it all over again,

give in to fall deeper forward over the blade,

in and out.

Give into the hand

that never leaves the knife.

There is nothing to hold on to.

Your arms

fallen off and silent on the ground,

feet like tree root planting the fall to

always have been there,

to always be.

Day thirty-eight:

Hold the hands that brush top down and on cheek. Hold on do it

all over,

again, again and pour out.

Send kisses to the concrete and

lap up dropping puddles of wound.

Liquid knife,

hand in the gash that feeds you,

and sigh

release,

smiling

breath of relief.

Day thirty-nine:

Darling,

you have never been able to imagine

anything larger than an empire.

Have you ever felt naked enough to try?

Y tu?

Y tu.

[everestwritespoems]

Self-Actualized

There is another breed

that doesn't perform,

that doesn't worry,

that moves without resistance,

that Maslow prophesied,

mythic in stature,

looming over me,

casting my shadow.

All that I am not

is the other, equal half

to everything that I am,

and without it I am incomplete.

I am sold a lie,

and through buying it, I can define myself.

I can measure myself against the ideal.

Without that measurement I am nothing.

Without those marks on the wall

there's no proof that I grew.

Even if I'm still so small on the scale,

microscopic

compared to who I could be,

compared to what I'm not.

But if I'm smaller,

each feeling will be larger.

[everestwritespoems]

How the Panic Attack Starts

Here are my laces

for you to tie me up,

to pull me back when I say when.

It's so quiet that when I speak,

I feel like no one’s listening.

The more I shout the less you make out,

and your kisses take my breath away.

This is how the panic attack starts,

and how it ends is with a broken heart.

If I could swear to god I'd say fuck.

The only luck I get is the kind that sucks.

Don't remember if

you choked me when you raped me,

but I still feel like I'm suffocating,

and the bruises haven't healed yet.

And the worst part about it is.

[everestwritespoems]

Predestination

The cold truth is

a lot of things change,

but the popcorn kernel that birthed me doesn't.

The skin I shed is swallowed and buried deep within me,

sewn into the inside of my insides.

There is no fixation I can foster

that will break me out of the pattern

laid out in front of me

like the way back home.

But it ends with me.

I will tear up the map when I get to the X.

It is my biological imperative to have poor impulse control

and an inability to self regulate.

It's my biological imperative to get drunk,

when I'm careening into shallow water

and my only cushion is fire.

When they dig up my bones they'll say I wasn't a woman but I played one on TV.

My skeleton is a different person than me.

My skeleton wants to jump off a building.

My skeleton can't stand this.

My skeleton can't cope.

They will hold my trial at the bottom of a snake pit,

the evidence a deafening collective hiss:

here is your destiny, birth right, original sin, inevitability,

passed down through fathers of fathers,

and justice shall be served by your limitations,

and each failure will live on as an echo,

and each lesson will die on impact.

[everestwritespoems]

When You Go to Mars

When you drink the rain water,

and eat snow,

and remind yourself that you are 300,000 years old,

and see yourself in the scope of all time,

your brain in a jello mold,

shiny and wiggly,

ready to crumble into chunks and cubes and

sticky bits you can't quite get rid of -

or, in other words,

when you see yourself as antenna,

bunny ears,

hopping into the lower atmosphere, like

skimming the soup skin from below,

the plastic pool cover that lids your coffin -

or, perhaps,

when you see yourself as the confluence of

streams of light and truth and knowledge,

love and fear and hate and blood,

of four quadrillion dreams,

packed into a seed whose bud may not survive the winter,

being born to die so that you may live,

the sacrifice of yourself for yourself,

your own personal Jesus,

to kill yourself, to go fuck yourself

to become Oedipus oroborus,

to complex yourself,

to simplify and never be alone -

furthermore,

when you stop smoking because we love you,

wake up in a rocketship because Earth needs you,

tramp, stumble, and belly flop into nobility,

look at the dense fucks giving away free bibles out of a pickup truck in the grocery store parking lot in the pouring rain and reckon they really are dense sad fucks with nowhere else to be,

and not rise to higher ground,

just rise to the occasion

to be insignificant in the face of beauty,

the largest thing in the world,

and to Olympic torch the world,

like Marathon,

like the Brave Little Toaster -

all this to say:

when you go to Mars,

think of me.

[everestwritespoems]

Mythology,

made up of

all the space that's

in between us.

You live a

thousand lives in my head.

You thicken the

air, and

loom larger than life, with

Pythia your heart, and

Delphi your

breast.

A new world is created

every second. Every

blink wipes the

old one up.

All roads lead to

nowhere if

you walk

long enough.

[everestwritespoems]

And In Control of Nothing

I am delicate and

peel away like pedals, but I

am guttural and deep-voiced when I

am least expecting it. I

prefer the company of,

mostly,

women,

but I like my new name.

I do not have a chest, I have

tits, but I

was born with a dick and I

like my mustache.

When I

grab ass like a man, for

just a second I am. For

just a second, I am

a performative male. For

just a second, I am

just as woman as I was

five years ago. For just

a second, I am

in flux and

in control

of

nothing,

which is

how I like it.

Why bother getting a grip on it when

your spirit is flowing like the

ocean, when your skin is

tanned to a hide?

They will hunt me

no matter what, they will

find me eventually, so

I will just

let it flow out of me like

sap.

[everestwritespoems]

Don't Look Down

Let's take a break

and read with our shirts off.

Its getting too hot in here

to think about love

as more than a feeling,

as more than the energy

promised in our bodies.

Isn't that enough?

Crawl

under the house.

They call it a crawlspace.

But don't look down,

there's monsters under your bed.

Call it a Lazarus heart,

my nail in the coffin,

a screw loose.

I've been cutting corners this whole time.

I spend so much of my life

waiting, as a condition,

to earn the permission to try,

but I still come up short.

[everestwritespoems]

iridescence

For years I refused to cry,

not because it would break character,

but because it would unravel the actor.

Then, I let bats in through the window

to fly between my eyelids,

to dive and skim the sclera,

and drip the crude mercury oil of my iris off its wings.

Now, the bat that bites

imparts the same vapor and venom

that once crested and spilled out of my marsupium,

which I can finally sew shut

and live with as a scar.