My mind was gray and cloudy today
It rained and it snowed
I thought I was through all of that.
Yesterday the sky was blue
And the grass was green
And I was stuck on the other side of a glass pane.
The cruel joke
Of seeing beauty but never experiencing it
I can feel the teeth inside my head as they slowly rot
The consequences of a childhood bad habit I never found the strength to kick
I remember my childhood
I remember laughing
I remember enjoying it
Yet still I find myself cursing it,
The youth that prepared me to be who I am today.
I have a terrible memory.
i wish i had a body i loved
i try to remind myself
it is not my body that is wrong
it is their perception of me
but their words seep in like venom
i hear myself say
wearing this makes you look thin
i forget to ask why
i want to hide
you say you wish you had my body
i tear at the lumpy parts of me in the mirror
i want to hide
you say
you're getting fat like me,
i don't want you to be ugly like me
honey dipped words made for guilt
i want to hide
but i dont want to hide
there are days when i look in the mirror
and i smile
i want that everyday
but i dont want to change
not for you
I want to stitch the wounds of the world,
But I am only one needle and one thread.
They tell me, "Go out and make a difference!
You are but one, but together we are a million!
If everyone stays home, we are none."
I cannot control what they do,
But I know I sometimes feels less than one.
I am half of what I must be.
I have hooked my thread to every sorrow,
and it has left me frayed and tangled.
Perhaps I should stitch my own wounds first.
I fear if I wait until I'm ready,
I will wait until my life is over.
They call the words that society has deemed inappropriate "four-letter words."
They say love is a four letter word.
A word that dare not leave my mouth, no matter how hard I try.
My eyes see the color of the changing leaves,
My mind says beautiful,
My mouth tells tales of the dead leaves, lying on the ground like corpses in an unkept graveyard.
My eyes see the shape of you, my ears hear the way you sound when you laugh,
My mid says beautiful,
My mouth falls silent.
I keep the word, "love" locked away inside me like some deep dark secret,
Like if I let it go it would never come back,
It would die in a hole somewhere, never to be seen or heard from again.
Like if I told the world how much you meant to me,
The value of those words would suddenly depreciate.
I've locked away my feelings from you,
Hidden them in some far-off corner,
Never to be seen.
But cut my heart open and you'll see not blood,
But all the feelings I've locked inside
Will come gushing out in an unstoppable wave
Unlock my tongue with yours, that I may sing your praises,
That the world may know of the man who taught my heart to love,
Who saved me from my prison.
Today
In a small town in Wisconsin
A couple comes into a small restaurant
A man,
A woman.
They kiss.
The employees are filled
with disgust,
with slight embarassment,
They turn away,
They go back to their jobs,
They go back to their lives,
They move on.
Today
In a large town in Florida
A man watches a couple together,
A man,
A man.
They kiss.
The man is filled
with rage,
with hate.
He gets a gun.
He gets 100 bullets.
He gets 50 dead bodies.
He gets 50 wounded.
He gets families left behind to grieve, to wonder.
He gets innocent live cut short.
He gets congratulated.
He gets people on social media telling him it's about time.
He gets a president hopeful saying he knew this would happen, he was right all along.
Straight privelege is not having to care who sees,
not having to worry,
not having to worry that your one act of love can mean the death of one hundred people.
Straight privelege is sitting in a classroom,
Declaring to the world that the age of homophobia is over,
While shouts of "faggot" ricochet in the memories of the lone gay student,
Like bullets just looking for a way out.
Cisgender previlege is resting easy in a bathroom,
While litle transgender kids face bullying for being themselves,
While gender-nonconforming adults face the police for making strangers uncomfortable.
From the moment queer kids are born,
This world is a battlefield,
Telling themselves to off themselves before someone else does it for them.
Calling them perverts
Sinners
Mistakes
Wastes of breath
A onslaught of unspeakable things.
This is the land of the free
That my brothers, sisters, siblings
The sons and daughters and children of the revolution are born into.
This messed up world where love is met with hate.
Where one month sees nine school-age cihldren take their own lives,
And unless something changes,
Unless something gets better,
Every drop,
every iota of blood is on their hands.
Every person who says this isn't important,
Every person who ignores the problem,
Every person who throws slurs on the street,
Every person who throws their child out on the street,
Every person who ever made one of us feel worthless,
Someday,
They will stand accountable for what they've done.
Once upon a time, in a far off kingdom, there lived a prince. Now, this prince was not what you would expect when you first hear the word. This prince was not brave; this prince was not courageous; this prince was not fierce or strong or bold. The arms of the prince were not as massive oaks, and the sleeves of the prince’s shirt did not tear off when he flexed; indeed, the prince barely even know how to flex. The prince knew not how to handle a sword, mace, or crossbow, but would revel in spending hours at a time lost within a book.
But the prince had an even more nefarious secret than all of these, and that was this: while all the other princes of the land were waxing poetic about the fair maiden they would one day wed, this prince found himself more interested in those of his own gender. To make matters worse, it was not even the other royal men that caught his attention—them, with their haughty and heteronormative talk. No, the prince had found himself infatuated with the men of the lower class, the peasants. They never thought too highly of themselves, and were always kind to everyone they met.
To say that the prince had fallen in love would be an overstatement. No pauper in particular had caught his eye, but he knew there was something special about them. Their men caught his eye is a way that no woman ever had.
When his mother, the Queen, found out about this, she was furious.
To say that the Queen was evil would be an overstatement. She meant well, and always had what she thought was the best for her little man in mind. Still, her plans and the prince’s plans did not always meet up, and despite his best efforts to get her to see things his way, the Queen did what the Queen wanted.
“You’re a prince,” she had said. “I didn’t raise you to like men. You were born a prince and raised a prince, and princes like princesses.”
The prince thought this odd, for he knew she had not raised him to like princes, but that did not stop him from doing so. Clearly, he was a prince who liked men, and whether or not he was raised this way did not seem to make a difference. Her logic, to him, seemed quite flawed indeed.
Yet she was the Queen, and what she said went.
In a desperate attempt to have the prince see the error of his ways, the Queen had him shipped off to a faraway land to save the fair princess locked in the tower guarded by the fierce dragon. On his way, the prince could not help but wonder at the seeming abundance of fair princess locked in towers guarded by fierce dragons. Perhaps, when he is crowned king, he shall have all the old abandoned towers knocked down.
When the prince first entered the tower, the scenery was what you would expect. Bones and skulls were strewn across the great hall. Yet the prince noted that that they were not so much strewn as they were meticulously set so as to be daunting yet aesthetically pleasing to the well-trained yet morbid eye.
After traversing up and down a great deal of steps, the prince finally found the correct spire. When he got to the princess’ room he was not so much glistening with sweat as he was doused in a shower of sweat. The new, top-shelf travelling tunic he had bought just for this occasion had been torn in a few places and was stained in a few others. Overall, his was not the appearance the average prince would wish to have if he were to be meeting his princess for the first time. This prince, however, did not care, and would not be at all heartbroken if the princess did not choose to return with him.
As he opened the door, the prince could not help but wonder at how he had not yet seen the infamous dragon. As the princess rushed to embrace him, the prince could not help but wonder at how she automatically assumed he was straight; just because he was rescuing her did not mean he wanted to get into her pants. As the ceiling was ripped away from the rest of the room, the prince could not help but wonder why it was that he was the one being grabbed instead of the princess!
It was only as he was flying high above the mountainside that the prince realized he had not been given a sword to fend the dragon off with. Not that it would have done him much good. But as the prince looked up at the magnificent beast, he noticed not hate but something like love in his eyes. Had the dragon wanted to kill the prince, the dragon could have dropped him and let him fall to his death. Yet here he was, admittedly shaken but still very much alive. After a while, the prince relaxed. Indeed, if he were to truly admit his feelings, he found flying through the air, high above the world of queens and princesses and heteronormativity, to be quite exhilarating!
Eventually, the dragon descended to a quaint little cave in the side of a mountain. The prince saw that it was furnished with only the finest purple and gold from around the many kingdoms. The dragon had exquisite taste.
The dragon set the prince down gingerly, then curled up beside him. The pair never took their eyes of the other, but neither made a move to harm the other. When the prince held out his hand the dragon flinched, but then the dragon rubbed its head against the prince’s hand. The skin of the dragon felt hot and cold, smooth and scaly all at the same time. It felt like nothing the prince had ever felt before, like pure magic encapsulated into physical form. It excited the prince greatly.
The dragon took the prince into the dragon’s home, and there the two of them lived peacefully away from the world for months. But one night when the dragon was out in the world, the dragon noticed a group of soldiers out in the fields below. They were discussing the missing prince, and how the Queen was terribly distraught.
When the dragon brought this news back to the prince, the prince was conflicted. He had not meant to worry his mother, but he also did not especially want to go back to the life that he had once lived. (He was also still questioning the morality of sending him to a fight a dragon without a sword, a fact that he was less and less able to pass off as a fluke with each passing day). But the prince had a big heart, and was unable to sit idly by while knowing that his mother suffered. So the dragon and the prince returned to the prince’s home.
There was not a welcoming party for the prince. The prince was not met with fanfare or flowers or dancing or joy. Rather, the prince was met with fear (or rather, the dragon was met with fear, and the prince remained undetected). The dragon and the prince were met with arrows and spears and yelling, the kind of welcome that you would expect for a feral beast rather than a beautiful creature and long-lost royal heir.
Of course, the castle did not have a door big enough for a dragon to fit through, so the dragon had to make a door out of the magnificent stained glass window that shone into the throne room. The Queen was not pleased with this. At first she had her guards attack the dragon, but then, seeing the prince, she scolded him.
“What do you think you are doing?” she yelled at him. “You don’t call, you don’t write. I thought you were dead! I missed you so much, and the first thing you do is come in here and attack my guards! How dare you!”
The prince was furious. For all of his life she had tried to fix him into the little box she had constructed of what a “proper prince” should be. At last, when she had forced him so far as to put his life in danger, he had escaped and was finally happy. Then, when he decided to come back, in consideration of her feelings, he was greeted immediately with physical, verbal, and emotional violence. How dare he? How dare she!
The prince had had enough! He yelled at her.
If he was going to come back to stay, things would have to be different. No more forcing him to like princesses when it was clear that he didn’t. If he wanted to live with a dragon rather than a princess, that was his business and not hers. He was the master of his own life, not her.
The Queen protested, but it is difficult to win an argument with someone who has made friends with a dragon.
So the prince moved back to the castle, and the dragon moved with him. The dragon was protected by the royal guard, and eventually the whole kingdom came to love the dragon. The Queen had many years left in her reign, but they were filled with civil conservations with her son rather than arguments. When she passed away, the prince became the King, and he was a great king. The land prospered under his rule, and all of the old abandoned towers were knocked down.
I will not hide again.
I cannot be contained.
I am an explosion, a brilliant burst of
Rainbows, magic, glitter, and all the fabulous things you hate.
I have never been able to fit inside the tiny box you've made for me,
And I'm not about to start filing down my edges for you now.
I'm tired of hiding.
I'm going to shout it from the rooftops: “I'm gay!”
(—even though that's not entirely true,
but I'd rather be thought gay than straight—)
I'm an agent of the radical homosexual agenda of love, peace, and acceptance.
I'm here to kidnap your children,
And indoctrinate them into the cult of loving themselves
No matter what gender they may or may not find themselves falling hopelessly in love with.
I'm here to yell,
“You're killing your children!”
“You're killing your religion!”
“You're killing my religion!”
“You're killing me!”
Your loving words fall empty and disbelieved
On the bruises that cover our arms and the slits that gouge our hearts.
You sympathy is shown through
Emptiness,
Brokenness,
Loneliness,
Cries of
“If there's anyone out there, just make the pain go away I'll do anything,”
In the dark hours of the night when anyone with anything left to lose
Has already found the sweet serenity of sleeps.
The slits across our writs are battlefields
Where you quarrel over the final destinations of our souls like some theoretical concept,
Blind to the kids already damned in a world that says their love is
Wrong,
Immoral,
Shameful,
Sinful.
In the gutters lie kids aching for the arms of a savior who chose sinners over saints
And whose love was wide enough to extend to the very end of the earth.
Tell me, where has this love gone?
Is this the love you claim to be famous for?
The love that has us staring down the barrel of a gun?
