I'd like to someday
be a hearthstone
rather than the stepping stone
that propels forward.
But stones only
get re-purposed
when the original structure
is falling apart
and while the step stone
gets carted away first,
it's because no one
lives inside
any longer.
and a hearth
with no fire
is just as cold.

Scratch

(NSFW)

When I see a wheelchair
I see freedom
from structuring my days
around the uncertainty of how far
I can walk
without collapsing in pain,
how long
I can stand in line
before the slivers in my hips
leave me crumpled
at the feet of people
who if they see me
think me lazy,
how late I can stay
in the room
and still get myself
back to home, or away
under my own steam.

But I also see that
you wouldn't want me
in your business,
in your homes and houses
of worship (can't I sing lochi dodi too?)
unless I take the entrance
past the dumpster and the kitchen
lingering their scents to remind
my neighbors with dirty hands my difference,
unless carried or crawling up stairs
dragging it behind me to enter
temples of our protected pasts,
and have visited upon me
that which I cannot visit upon you.

So the chair is kept
in my mother's barn
for the more dire need
and I hobbled by limiting dreams
the shape of sweeping steps
let my shoulders ache
my way up the steps by cane-
at least with it, I can go farther
than my front door.

It's an essential part of life
to learn to adjust to
perpetual
disappointment.

you are soft and
angry and rounded and
I want to curl up under your
long sweaters, huddling against
another sick body like my own and
breathe away the day in the scent of your
breasts beneath my cheek. I know that
crawling under your bed and letting
your fingers caress my hair when
we are both sad, confused, and
dizzy with pain or bodily failings is
a little dream to comfort me when I
am falling asleep at night alone, but I
wish the long days I spend in bed staring
out the window at the clouds as the pain
takes off with my ability to form thoughts
into sense were augmented by the feel that
I imagine your belly against my back would
give, the texture of you as you sigh your
way through the impossible tasks
we are set by people who
don't know the reality
of working from bed.

A Million Seconds (An Amicable Breakup)

I thought this'd hurt—
knowing it's something I couldn't keep.
But when I ask myself what tears are for?
Lubrication— salt and enzymes to cleanse
perpetually gaping wounds
to our social egos.

So let's tell the truth—
a million seconds ago I was not thinking about you.
And though it hurts to say
I wouldn't have it any other way.
It's no one's fault—
some interests just fade away.

I thought you'd be mad
by my lack of pain, of suffering
in the face of distractions, other interests gained.
Pheromone receptors filled with the light of another.
So we each ignored natural urgings
signals to move on.

Let's be frank —
a million seconds ago you weren't thinking of me either.
and though I'd like to stay,
all good things end some day.
It's no one's fault—
some interests just fade.

Why'd we stay against our nature?
The pressures of drama that drives men
to drive Lemmings off cliffs
Lines to fit socially required greed.
An entitlement to make
another's heartbreak our entertainment.

Today let's rectify
A million seconds of pretending nothing had changed.
Of lining up for more impact than reality, for
Reasons beyond natural truth.
It's no one's fault—
some interests just fade away.

________________
A million seconds seems both too big to consider and too small to fit- but it really comes out to less than 12 days. Inspired by the Vlogbrother's video, When Was It a Million Seconds Ago?

It is hard to fight 

When life is framed

So that not falling

Under their sword by now

Is somehow a great moral failing. 

An Ivy, Language.

Language is the ivy vine
I wrapped around my
ugly seeming walls
in my early days before

I knew my foundations
are like many sedimentary
and amalgamated large
and small, varying poracity

bound together from parts
that the soil would be in
a thousand years under
pressure and heat.

The tiny tendrils suck
to dig into me, and
I would not let my hands
brush away the tiny hurts

until they'd long since
laid the cracks that
would make it easier
to crumble my foundations.

It's ok,
I've known for a
long time that
I'll end up
without a pair.

There's something
inevitable about learning
that even your most basic dreams
are flights of fancy.

And girls like me
aren't meant to dream
(Girls like me
are meant to bleed)

My Orientation Manifesto

your Consent is more relevant 

to me and what I want and

how and if it goes beyond 

my appreciation of you as

pleasing to behold

than your gender, sex, or

identity. Your consent is

more meaningful than what

pronouns we use for each other-

and damn they best be pronouns

you've consented to in the first place,

Anyhow- or who you have or haven't

fucked or wanted to fuck before. 

Our consent is more important here

than what we call what we are doing

touching fucking loving abstaining or

any one of a number of other intimacies

that we grant each other permission for

named or unamed. Our consent is ours,

is our time together whatever we do

whatever we pretend or build- our consent

is what builds our safety, the foundations we

elaborate on in building today's "safe sex"

whatever else we add to make our intimacy safe. 

I want your consent to engage in our

tenderness, our aggression, our dances and 

fights and how we act on what intimacy we

each agree we want. The rest is stage dressing

for the best play to act in/on/with, the

endless variations of what

intimacy can look like. 

You want some word for my desire

beyond the ambiguous "queer"? My

desire is for consenting partners in

intimacy and that is as close to

specific that I can ever fucking give you. 

because that is as specific as I can get.

Something needs to happen
before I feel the
rising balloons
pop beneath
my fingers.

I am up way past my bedtime
and I can't manage to go to sleep-
my stomach is full of nausea and
there's the chicken I meant to cook
in my fridge and yet I couldn't
bring myself to get around to cooking
it as there were a thousand steps
between here and there and
I don't have it in me anymore.
The air that ballooned me
on memories of touch
has hissed out
flat and now
empty

I don't think that
I am being too
specific when
I say all I
want is someone
whose views and ideas
political
do not disgust
me, who wants kids
someday if we
can, is Jewish
and tolerates
me for more than
a few weeks out.
Hopefully and
attractive to
me enough for
things to work well
in the bedroom.
I don't even care
what this person's
gender might be
though I know that
if they read as
a dude it will
be easier
sometimes to find
faith community.
How is this at
all asking too much?

This is not a
narrow range by
which to look so
don't tell me that
My scope is too
narrow when I
worry that I'll
be forever
alone. Again.

I Love you mom.
But this really
does not help me.

I become more and more aware
as time goes on that
I don't have much to give when
it comes to finding
another person to spend life with.
I have piled against
me disadvantages like raw rubies
and nothing polished
to show to the prospective lover.
Who would want the
girl whose treasures when polished
shrink down to a single
rope of pearls out of a mountain of
the raw materials?
The weight of the raw becomes a
burden, and to polish
them to a shine I would need help.
seeking a helpmate
when you actually are needing help
feels next to impossible.

Letter I

I am lacking in courage.
I 'm spending my nights alone.
I can't bring myself to write
the things I fear my head holds.
When I look and remember
the way that you held me near
to feel the feel of your breath
bask in the warmth of our skin
I can't help but remember
the terms set when we began.
I think of what "maybe" is
and "not opposed to" as well
things I wasn't looking for
building a tacit rule on
the things that we cannot be.
The things you aren't looking for
are the ones that you will find
so building up nos based on
what you don't currently seek
is a fool's game after all.

I am building
up the ways
the thing that pays
for the early parts of the days
where I lay beside you feeling
all that I wish we were being
together in the quickly ending evening
in the rooms where my heart now stays.

I will not
find out
what it is
that made
us special.

We are just
a gathering
of little bones
in bags
of flesh.

I just want
to repeat
until I believe
that we
are nothing.

(Because if we
are something,
then I am
wasting my
needed chances

to find out
if you
and I could
ever be
more than

The way that
you feel
when I wake
beside you
alive. safe.)

My shoulder cracks as I lay on my side
and shift to look out the window
at the growing storm.

Our bodies find age at their own pace
and ignore the predictive powers
of media'd averages.

My body aches and enjoys at its own rate
and doesn't care to fall into the
labels built for it.

I fall into repetition as I find the ways
and build means of becoming
at ease with it-

My body does not fit your easy narratives
and as hard as that is for you to
fathom, I

am
living
all
the
same.

walls of text find paths to carry us

Intoxicant, I read of other touches and thought
of your feel on my skin instead, the way that my
lips felt pressed against yours, your flesh, your
shoulder sleeping. It is a wall of sensations that
rises before me as I pull my self through other's
words for other's touches, other's sensations,
other's desires. Instantaneously my mind replaces
them with you, and I find myself wanting only
to return to that place you lay resting till our
kiss brought you to me, nearer and closer than
I dared to hope for. That is an intoxicant, you.

I lay myself

stretched out

and wanting

a path through

a way to find

myself back

within our

desire.

Distance

makes a 

cruel but

effective

barrier.

I found that my commonsense had fled me

as I  drew myself out along the warmth that

pulled at me like a sun warmed pool in the 

river  at the beginning of summer nights,  the

needed soothing to burnt skin and hearts after

the scorching of our efforts to build the world

Leaves us parched, wanting something to  be

enfolded by that is familiar and safe. I cried the

pain of every heartbeat and was held in safety. 

To repair the world

Putting the 

world back together

is exposing

your soul 

to hate and

darkest nights

of human souls

to sift out

sun shining traces

the golden lights

of this world.

Can you tear apart the pieces
of what they've left behind
fast enough to eliminate
the echos of our time
spent waiting to leave as
we build apart our homes
All I can do is pray the rainstorm
doesn't come too soon.

All I can do is wait for the rainstorm
to wash away what's left of you.

Sun

When I was a child,
sunlight was warm and
bred a glowing contentment
in my flesh, a build up to
happiness preserved.

My adulthood came
and my growth went
tangled paths so that the sun
became cruel, a radiating
burn from little.

I have felt togetherness
like my adult sun- heat
growing to burning and the regret
that on my heart left behind
reddened flesh.

I feel togetherness with
you like my childhood sun
warm, glowing nurturing and joy
glowing my skin- don't let
me teach you burning.

To a beloved fandom's center

Love is not uncritical.
Love pulls into you and causes you
to feel, to want, to desire more for
and from and want to build up upon.
Taking aside love and knowing that
it wants to be more, and so  it should
be worked upon, casting away from
that thing that undermines them is not
hate, and when that thing is overlooking
the ways that our loves build oppression
that is not hate, is not passive aggressive
or turning like rabid dogs to say, woah,
that is not ok, that is not cool, that hurts me
and that tells others as oblivious to it as you
that it's ok, especially when they know you
are loved by one of us, one of those people
that on a bright day you took a sample of
one of to be your character to do something
that plays into the pre-existing images of
us, us as foolish, as violent, as without
intent or the ability of it, as passive, as side
characters in our own stories, as lacking
the fucking complex narratives that are the
realities of all of our inner lives, even us,
even the people who you were taught are
not like you, not like the them you write
your narratives for, that we are not the
ones who would build up love anyway.

Did you have any premonition,
Shulie, that you would end this
in isolation, alone?

I feel these fears and worry
about the way that archetypes
echo out in time.

Is it division that builds our
isolations, or do we defeat
ourselves, lady?

When we realize the way of the world.

Faking it

till you make it

with cheerfulness when depressed

is not mania, though it may be madness-

but useful, this madness, that staves off the dread.

The pain of
moving
in the cool crispness
of the night air
joints, like wooden frames
creak eerily
leaving echos within
the tissue around
denying passage
for fear
of breaking.

The sea is long
cold and warm
but ever wet,
beating and ever moving
in time with
the pulls
into eternity.

I watch the pressures
of plates rise the mountains
in a slow dance begun
before my eldest fore-bearers
began to squirm
towards them.

we stay, and die
and conquer and still
there is that which continues
without us, our perception--

constancy defined
not by actions or commotions
but by the beating
of one's heart

What are words for
when they fall
meaninglessly
away

Into

Silence. . .

Small inside aside

There are things one ought not assume
Based purely upon the exchanges said
In offices, halls, and in correspondence
Meant to remain in professional domain.

I have been up long nights
With my head cradled on
Wet pillows and stared out
At the yellow street lamps.

In the day unseen I
End up with cheerful
Words and doing all
The simples given.

But my doings?
dim reflectors
Of products
Once dreamt.

I grow
Smaller
Each
Day.

As a child summer clung
as a veil about the summers
hazed in greens and yellows
the trunks of trees rising in
moss'ed woods and
sprouting into the edge of pastures
long abandoned in the old age of
the loved strangers leaving the land to
the adventuring of children
as the days lingered.

I huddled then as the
words blurred into cadences
that would allow me sleep
in the age of always storm
battered hearts and
Learning to love the manner in which
the surge hits the surf and rain trembles
the window panes on which it falls upon
the dreaming minds inside
as the nights lingered.

We held hands in the summer
that birthed our majorities and
witnessed us grown together
and apart again, from strangers
to loved to strangers
again, as distance and realization that
nothing can stay the same as they were
when we could count forever on our freckled
wandering backs that year
as childhood lingered.

____________

Day one of National Poetry Writing Month!

I set aside
The things which I strode
Towards when my legs had
Strength for long treks
For attempts at those things
They said I was incapable of.
I was capable.
I wasn't capable of returning
To myself, not soon enough
To avoid losing all my gains
For want of being called
"Unselfish."

And my potentials withered
As so many yellowed flowers.

Beware of those which tell you
That all you wish to do
Pales in comparison
To that which they've left
To haunt your halls
To tell you you're unworthy.

I know it is hopeless
But--
There is nothing, in
My life, to hope for if
We aren't allowed to hope for
Hopeless things.

The prosaics are even
Laid out
Impossibly distant and
Unreachable from here
A good home of family my own
To raise as I will.

The plans I have made
To build
Up ambition of my own have
Crumbled to dust so that my aims
Are restricted to what I can pull to me from
My partnered half.

Hopelessness is endemic
To what
Is available to aim for.