#wod.txt

[defences-down]

I'm deeply frustrated by the rise of generative AI again, so my requests are open again until 11:59pm eastern on the 6th of April. If you have something you'd like to read, short story, poem, fic from a pairing that I write, what have you, drop it in my inbox and you'll be met with a surprise over the next couple of weeks.

Nothing can replace human art, human creativity, and connection, so my inbox is open.

As always, I reserve the right not to write any prompt, but I'll let you know if I'm not gonna do it.

[defences-down]

A daffodil came poking out of the hard earth today and I thought of you.

Not you, exactly.

The idea of you.

The idea of a person who could have been a love giver.

But it's complicated, you see.

The obligation that hangs over me.

Because like that daffodil, I know you tried.

I know how hard you tried to escape your past

Running from it on bare feet

Kicking up gravel.

But I can know this and still see the eraser marks.

The hand prints smudged with coal on the paper of my story.

The dialogue that I'm never quite free from.

I can stare at that daffodil in the neighbour's garden and know that they're poison.

[defences-down]

Behind the garden gate there is a truth

One too precious to be seen by most

Past tangled ivy and wisteria, I've seen it all.

The cracks of light between—

Before you passed the key so willingly on bits of string

They drew me there

Looking for hope

It was there in the marking on the bricks nearby

You scratched it there for me to find—

[defences-down]

I wonder what it would be like to tell you all the wonders of my world.

The way that man smiles when the goal goes sailing in.

The sweets I found at the grocery or the book I read this week.

All the little magics of my day.

There is a grief in loving you and not being seen by you.

Physically, sure, you can see, the marks on my stomach from a life well lived.

The way my hands shake around a cold glass.

But you don't see me.

Not like they see me.

The artist.

The sunshine.

The answer to a question asked somewhere between wake and sleep.

The morning dew.

The comfortable arms.

A home in a person.

And maybe that's okay.

Maybe a life given is just that...

Given

Pressed into the arms of others

But, not by you.

By me.

There's a fire escape on the building's edge.

And I've crawled down it before.

Crashed on hands and knees.

The singed sheep.

Crackling.

Burning, but free.

[defences-down]

Spread like butter over hot bread the night descends with her cicadas and smoky haze.

The nights where I lie in the cold grass and feel the clouds caress my too warm frame.

There are frogs in the lake, and I think about what it was like when she grabbed my hand in the rainstorm

When she couldn’t tear her eyes from my mouth.

Her fingers tracing the freckles, dancing through splotches of colour on red and white.

She never saw me after that summer but I saw her in my mind.

In the moment between wake and sleep where the world feels like falling.

[defences-down]

A pang comes sometimes at the worry that society has grown tired of poetry—

Of Art.

Find it useless or cheap to think like an artist...

After all, why make art?

Why make art when the world is how it is...

Why "waste the time" when you can have a robot do it?

Not realising it follows us artists everywhere. It's physical. And ephemeral. And impossible to ignore. And it's possible to learn.

You just have to find that thing. You know it, it's in there. Maybe it fell away when the last good crayon rolled under a desk but it's there. A little you is holding it like a rock from the creek or a shell from the beach. It's in there glowing.

It could be a ball soaring through the air on a rainy Thursday evening.

The kind of evening where the lights blur like how they did that Christmas when you were seven and you were in the back seat of your family car.

You'd fall asleep, warm with your favourite present in your lap.

Your granny always loved the Christmas lights, you never forgot that.

The way the petals of supermarket roses tumble to the speckled airport floor.

Trembling hands crunching cellophane.

The low hum of a radiator just before their job is done for a season.

The song that's stuck in your head as you watch your girlfriend in the gallery ahead of you, there's a painting of someone else's girlfriend next to you.

"Muses", someone else remarks, "they never change."

It comes from all the same place

Hope, fear, doubt, anger, love — lust

Humanity.

They wanted you to forget.

But it's there.

You can't forget it.

Don't forget it.

Pick up a pen, a paintbrush, an old crayon under a desk.

And maybe it's not "good" at first, but good has always been subjective. Make the damn thing anyway.

[defences-down]

It was about ten years ago, and I was sitting somewhere on campus, probably in my dorm in all honesty, watching a man give a press conference. What I didn't know then, mere months after gay marriage was legalized in the states, is how those words about a football team would become my whole philosophy about life and so too my queerness.

Yes, he was talking about a team and game I love dearly, but the lessons learned on the pitch or from watching the boys at home apply outside of the game, too.

He said we have to turn from doubters to believers.

You may ask yourself what that has to do with being queer and/or trans, but the thing is, it has everything to do with it. There are people in this world that make us as queer and trans folks doubt ourselves, people who think that we are sinful, shameful creatures not worthy of anything. But it's not true. Just like people have doubted my team and our ability to succeed over the years, people doubt our ability to know and to exist fully as ourselves. They try to change us or make us feel like we are liars, but we're not.

To be entirely yourself in the face of constant abuse and targeting by political figures takes an immense amount of courage. We have to believe in ourselves and believe in our team (fellow queer and trans folks). They will doubt us at every twist and turn, but we have to believe in ourselves. All we have is belief in the end. We know who we are, and nothing can stop us. They can try to make us shrink, but we are mighty. We have always been here, we will always be here. They can say whatever they want, but we know the truth. We are radiant. We are worthy. Don't let them make you doubt yourself. You know who you are. Fuck anyone who says otherwise. Don't go down without a fight.

Happy trans day of visibility, y'all.

[defences-down]

I have a vision board of my life and it's beautiful.

It's strawberries from the market on a rainy Friday afternoon eaten over the sink.

It's a cat snoozing in the window seat, tired from a long day of never getting called by his name and chirping at birds.

It's a bookshelf hauled up stairs laden with manuscripts turned hardbacks turned paperbacks in languages I will never speak.

It's magnets holding up postcards in languages I do.

It's a coffee maker whirling to life as another cat makes my ankles his rubbing post.

It's the salt air through an open window.

A bike helmet next to football boots next to keys.

It's a life that's really something.

It's coming home and relaxing into a lover, knowing that the world expanded in that kitchen in November or that lobby or any of the places I thought it was ending.

It's hope that finally somehow, someday, I'll get this right, and the ache is just growing pains.

That my shoulders won't feel like caving in.

My chest, no longer burdened with the weight of expectations.

If hope is only tape and paper, let it be tape and paper.