Poetry

Find your footing on the ground 

Solid, like you know who you are 

Watch it soar through the sky 

Like a broken piece of the sun 

Shooting up past the stars 

i sit by the river 

   and 

           wait

i stand by the ocean 

I thought

This would be it.

Five and a half days would pass

Like lightning -

And you'd be gone,

And so would everyone else,

And we'd readjust,

Refocus again,

And I'd be back

To square one.

Do the penguins care

about the one with orange beaks, an extra stripe? 

Do the giraffes mind 

that his neck is longer, that she has less spots? 

Because the humans do, 

the bus driver glared at me

like i was a sin to society;

he called me a fag—under his breath,

and i got in my seat like nothing happened. 

There's a party in the penthouse

where people come and go

admission is free and based on nothing

and if you go once, you'll never truly leave.

It's not hard to get in, but you won't be invited

They won’t teach me how to be a woman— 
But they’ll notice when I’m not. 
Say I should smile more, try harder, 
Be brighter, quieter, 
Less me, more what they forgot. 

One day,

             you will feel pain so excruciating it becomes abstruse. You will feel numb, detached from the world, lost in a void of darkness. 

i dropped a plate once 

and i stood there 

looking at each crack 

and break 

like it would somehow change 

and i 

i can't look over the horizon 

but i know something is waiting 

in the orange and red 

that follows 

the setting sun 

sing to me.

i've been a stranger once more

to your hills and valleys, to the

gaps of sunlight between your grasping evergreens.

i've been a stranger

to the red barn

i'm split in two;

an exact replica on the outside,

my code is all the same. 

the original me;

who knows which piece,

you'll have to tear me apart to just see.