Old McDonald (is dead)

I know your name isn't
"McDonald" (My mother says
all she remembers is
"John" and that your
last name was not McD)

but that's what I remember
repeating to myself as
this tiny preschool spinner

when my brother and I sat
in your garage-art-studio

in a summer of early 90s.

I remember you were

towering and you had a beard that

I would call a marker

of a bear in later years

when I would try to trace out

in sculpting emotions in clay and

found objects.

I don't remember meeting you

more than once.

The motorcycle parts that fanned out

like a chart of the

cycles of the moon over

your desk where you sat to

talk payment for

that painting of mother in

neon cups whose

eyes cut flat. The

smell of grease and

the dust thick with oil

never escaped from under my nails.

10 years later I realized "your" scent-shape

formed under my hands as

I crafted a shape of myself

in other people's throw-aways-

how long did you shape my

busy sculpting before

I thought to ask my mother

for your name? Your history?

Your life?

I wish I knew where you are buried.

I wish I could bring you

one of the little things

your scent-shape built in me.

But a child's Old Mcdonald

is dead.

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.

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.