As defined by cycles of dreams and dreamless sleep,
You ask me why
I need to put a label in who I am,
“Can you not just be you?”
Of course I can
But you, as a cisgendet person
Have a privilege.
Society respects you,
Be you woman or man.
The label of nonbinary
Allows me to celebrate,
To be proud
Of every single part of me.
The pronouns and who I am
May confuse or even anger you,
But hear me when I say,
I’ll never stop celebrating
My neither identity.
This morning
I ate a really
not good
bagel.
You eat a lot
of not really good
food when you
live in a tent
staked 30 miles
from the nearest
town of 70
and you don’t
have a car.
It makes you
dream of
white bread and
good peanut butter.
And when your dad
call and tells you
hes eating veggie
tikka masala,
your favorite,
it makes you cry.
I don’t think you’re funny
and no one will tell you that.
I get paid to wear my smile like a mask
while you whistle and jeer. Circus lion
balancing on trapese of vocational awe.
Whip me when I trip.
Pin back my eyelids with specimen pins
and I will meet your gaze. But no one will like it.
Wearing his Moby Dick sweatshirt
our son commutes by bike.
In the basement of the library
he’s every patron’s favorite.
the grocery list needed tending to
a task that always keeps my grandmother busy
her familiar cursive writing neatly scrawling onto the page
she looks up at me and asks
“is there anything else?”
and my mind spirals
…..is….there…..anything….else?
and it’s as if i’m in a confessional
on my knees and burning with guilt
there is an entire world of wrong answers to that question
i’m non-binary
and you don’t know that
i’m gay
and you don’t know that
i drink
i smoke weed
i drive too fast
i’m getting more tattoos that you hate
i have sinned and sinned and sinned
forgive me
i’m hiding this all from you
but instead
i sit aflame
and i smile
looking back at her
and say
“i think we’re out of milk”
Daylight breaks forth
over the eastern hills
A kaleidoscope of colors paint
the sky of a new dawning, signaling
every winged creature to resonate
their melodious cacophony.
The sun rises scattering shadows
of fear and trepidation
with the emergence of hope.
God’s glorious new day
forever spawns a fresh beginning.
Solitary/existential
Leering/artificial
Erudite/sacrificial
Expressions/partial
Proliferation/obligatory
Terrarium/serum
Redrum/lobrium
Aesop/dream
Partially/reality
Every line of existence
Is a trap of excellence.
Rilke knew the power of objects
Joyce knew insanity protects.
Project precepts quirks reject
Obliterate protege memories offset.
Lobrium persists in the fringes,
Deters the persistence of understanding.
It proves reality is the unreal,
And that madness attracts zealotry.
That is how understanding is birthed,
In the spaces between the fringes.
At the end of language games,
That made Wittgenstein a madman.
funny, how the internet’s more permanent
than a coal camp
a town that can be erased when
the company switches off lights
well, not funny
maybe un-understandable
to my generation, but dad’s
well, the street you grew up on
just gone? he never says it like that,
but you can tell he thinks it
the more he talks about it
from his porch swing cushion
the houses, the many houses,
all in rows and occupied by
pickers, shovelers, foremen, wives,
drillers, blasters, mechanics, children,
friends, and you wonder
is it all half-remembered to him?
when you can’t go back, to point
at houses where they gave you big tips
when passing the newspaper, or that
old dirt road you used to take
over the hill on bikes to school
or the pit you dug, with the neighbor’s
mattock, pretending to mine for diamonds,
anything better than the dirty rocks
there, up a holler found only
on the internet now,
a place still on maps, its mouth still
opening up to the state road, where they
won’t even let you through the company gate
