You write a thousand brilliant

violent words and

your pretty fierce destruction

makes a thousand little movements

around your face

and every lovely frustration

and little pleasant pains

in these words your lyrics

in your little place.

(Those delicate chimes we call your voice

make all the world seem base beside

the way such gentle deep lashings

can break.)

be careful rabid heartsick

power fuelled and

un-alone one who spits out

the words that make me want to bring

you home and I

wish I could be the one

to find your secret places

as I bring you into mine

until I break.

In response to a statement on class privilege that happened to be ableist

[Image is text on a slate: “I do not care what you drive, Where you live. If you know someone who knows someone who knows someone. If your clothes are this years cutting edge. if your trust fund is unlimited. If you are A-list B-list or never heard of you list. I only care about the words that flutter from your mind. Ther are the only thing you truely own. They are the only thing I will remember you by. I will not fall in love with you Bones and Skin. I Will not fall in love with the places you have been. I will not fall in love with anything but the words that flutter from your extraordinary mind.”]

Okay, I get that
You are giving a valuable lesson
about class and love and all that
shit our society builds burdens out of.
I get it, I do.

BUT.

When you reduce people
and what you are able to love to
words “fluttering” out our minds
You are building a system based
on mindless Ableism-
Demonstrating your “able-minded”
Typical processing privilege.

I can never claim to know
where when or how you learned your
words, your language, that which flutters
out your brain into things so easy for a
world in which you are “normal” to Understand
and to get meaning out of.

BUT

That doesn’t mean I can’t tell you
EXACTLY how much bull shit it is
to assume that’s how I or Anyone
else gained language, How we think
how we process our world.

Let me tell you how
when I speak it is with borrowed words
trying to figure out what must be said
to communicate the WORDLESS NESS of
the thoughts and concepts in my mind.

I am not an empty void in here- I have amazing
Twisting, entwining, and vast thoughts which
I may NEVER be able to fully translate into
your “word language.” Years of trying mean
I have images of words trying to dance with
the pure thoughts I have- a brutal habit
that allows me to survive your world
with my apparently non-“extraordinary” mind.

So don’t reduce me, my thoughts, my feelings,
my being into words.

Don’t do it to the
random passer by, don’t do it to the
young man who desperately tries
to make up for translation brain errors
by assuming that gaining xyz will
allow him to pass in a world that
would call his inability to articulate
all his thoughts properly as
Vapid, or as sheep like.

Don’t do it to the girl who can’t speak
at all, and wants the status her lack of words
denies her while she taps at
her Assistive device to let you or her
friend know what she wants in her
coffee order.

Is it wrong to value people based on
class markers? I’ll be the first
to agree with you there in my
woman-formed body and torn
thrift store dress.

But my agreement with that
doesn’t mean I won’t
call you out on your own shit.

Speed Reading

And I'm stuck at this wall

making nothing at all

waiting out this is a cattle call

but I'm doing it

scream as loud as I can

-you're such a sensitive man,

tall, gloried egoless span

when you're screwing me-

Can I pull this apart

without destroying a heart

was I wrong from the start

when I asked that we

Hold on

hold down

the nausea that threatens to over take (it)

Hold on

hold down

and I don't know how much more I can take (of it)

We dance when we walk

and we sing we don't talk

our avoidances stalk

each other out till we

let the dawn wakes

from our glor'ous mistakes

and our tiny earthquakes

of denial and doubt

Gonna tear out my lungs

we're out of ladder rungs

and you're speaking in tongues

and I think that we'll

Hold on

hold down

the nausea that threatens to over take (it)

Hold on

hold down

and I don't know how much more I can take (of it).

I am nobody.

I walk the hall of many places

the streets of blooming and barren cities

and the molding of rooms full and empty

is my footpath.

These are not new haunts, or lurks, for me;

I have sat in the shadows of giants,

nursed at the teet of revolutions,

And spoken into the ear of power there

from my beige on beige perches and portals.

Those who possess kind words leave only

sheer slugs trails of personal expression and experience

My near invisibility intact when I, seated, am near

when the exchange of profession and proclamations

of projects produced are rung out.

My history, footprints, leave no trace there

and there is no reminders as to where I have tread.

BMI- Or...

BMI-

Or how your Denial of another girl's weight because she looks thinner proves my point.

The other day, I showed you a slide show

that I had seen.

It was of men and women- and

for humor's sake, a cat-

and listed their BMIs, along with their Heights

and Weights- or should I say, the components that

are used to calculate BMI.

To my horror, you agreed every time

a beautiful young woman

was labeled OBESE or MORBIDLY OBESE

or even OVERWEIGHT.

Until we reached her, a short young lady

with largish breasts and a bright label of OBESE

above her photo.

"She's OBESE? No she isn't, where are you

getting this???" you say.

I point to where her height (5'3") and

Weight (170lbs) is listed.

"That must be an old photo of her, there is no way that

she could possibly weight 170lbs!" and your denial of this

reality is a lead sinker to me.

"This," I explain, "is a photo project in which

people wer asked to submit

a photo of themselves and height and

weight at the time the

photo was taken. The point is that BMI is flawed.

That it has no conistent baring on the health of the subjects

and numbers don't predict a person"

You sputter then, and start to say that there

must be some reason why

the standard is still used- some proper data

must be recorded and consistent.

It takes me a long time to get you to understand that

BMI is a formula that is determined after recording Height and Weight

and that there is no reason

For this standard to keep on other than label someone's

fitness, for which purpose

it is useless- the point of this whole ordeal of

showing it to you.

This is after ramblings about measurements of necks waists

and heads- none of which are considered when little girls are given

a BMI in elementary school.

Little girls, just starting to mature, in a nurse's office with

a handful of other little girls

being measured and weighed on the mantis like scales

that always occupy that space.

As they step off the scales, and the school nurse tells her to put

her shoes back on as she calculates and then "publically" declares her

"Overweight" or even "Obese"

Maybe this isn't true anymore- I hope not, this public shaming of our

bodies just as they begin

to change and grow in ways we are trying to understand. I hope that

even if she is labeled "normal"

(which usage of the word is inaccurate) my niece is never made to

be given a label in the same small crowded spaces where I was shamed with

my body- height and weight.

Articulate

It is confusing when you say it-

Articulate.

Every time I hear it, I think

that maybe I do not understand the word

because it is not my experience of

how things rush out.

"1 divided into words or syllables meaningfully arranged"

Attempted.

I struggle to arrange these words

with only a "book" knowing of how they might mean

never knowing truly the meaning it is

arranging itself for you.

"2 Able to Speak" Sometimes or maybe even

Usually.

More often than I say, My thoughts

will not come into words, leaving me silently

wanting, tongue still yet wanting to

articulate out the within.

"3 expressing oneself readily, clearly, or effectively"

Hardly.

The words are sought for bitterly,

struggled with, and always- always- found lacking

in the ability of that first charge of

"expressing oneself"

Often these words are unwilling, jumbled, and ineffective to

Expound

the ideas that drive them;

my voice does not air readily the frustrations

laying between my thoughts and tongue

so you:

Fail to see the desperation of grasping for my words

Oblivious.

Failing to factor in affect

inconsistently portrayed, and routinely unprojected are

an accuracy of the emotion within, displaced

from line of sight.

That you do not hear my struggles does not mean they don't

Exist.

That I fail to emote them does not

end them. Just because you see meaning and effectiveness

does not mean that it is always as my

Intended pattern.

To Inspiration

I

I allow myself to wither
My passions separated out from
the lyrical
The core of thought desiccated
in prose
While I try to ferment these thoughts
unassisted
into words.

From time to time the dam breaks open
and my need for poetry to
translate
out my thoughts, unable to
contain
my scratch work in my head
any longer
to describe.

In this way the disparate parts of me
I segregate the elements that make me
my passion
from my thoughts, and so I dwell in the
facts and figures
moving out my emotions through a
vent hole
in private.

II

There is a time that a story can move
words without sound
dance more powerful without music
ecstatic exhalations of
power, emotion and thought in one
gigantic swoop of expression.

My own words trembled and failed to pass out
the encompassing effects.
But though my speech doesn't move
my thoughts do, my soul does
and, guided forward by the winds of fellows
already moving, I move too.

III

In 1969 (no jokes just now please)
Feminist Theorist Carol Hanisch declared
"The personal is Political"
A response to the idea that when a group
of people suffering under
oppression come together to discuss their
oppression, it is "Just group therapy."

Throughout the ages (maybe longer than we've been homo sapiens sapiens)
art has been a method of non-verbal declaration
Expression of our interior into the exterior world.
To dare to speak the unspeakable,
Expressing in words-
or without them- that which might,
in fullness, not lend itself to language alone.

We are taught (Or is it demanded?)

that our desperation is private, our personal

a secret to be shared in dimly- or fluorescently- lit rooms.

Our pain is somehow ours alone,

to separate experience

from the cause and conditions that

create and foster the framework upon which we are suspended.

Instead, someday (soon?)

can we not take our experience and, raw as art,

push out our collective ill-conceived self-loathing

acknowledging our unified-

and diverse-

experience, as people whose lives

before "without" defined, bloom from within identified out.

Dedicated to the performers of Sins Invalid- who inspire me not only to take my personal into public/political, but to take my experience- my "art"- there as well.