THE CLOSET MYSTIC

childhood was a pomegranate

that condemned a third of all my days 

to the underworld.

persephone,

why did our innocence have to be robbed?

and at who can i point the finger?

the abductees are blameless.

persephone,

oh persephone,

tell me —

why did our innocence have to be robbed?

oh,

the amber alert sounded for years,

and finally i retrieved the child,

but never again

will the child be found.

again i ask you:

persephone, why?

i thought i did my time–

released am i

from my prison confines 

but here i am

a freed man

still chained,

right here,

where i stand.

.

i thought i’d finally

earned my peace

yet here i am

in silence —

yet the noise 

did not cease.

.

not a noise to be heard

not another voice 

to make my stomach clench 

the vitriol is gone 

here am i, 

my own home front 

.

and yet in the quiet 

still are there voices screaming

echoes reverberating 

between my ears.

.

i thought i did my time

too young to have this much baggage.

too young for this depth and breadth.

i mourn a life of simplicity,

aboveground, 

not traversing systems 

six feet under 

to be on a kayak traversing the harbor,

not in turbulent waters 

out in the deep sea 

i can never have a simple life

Persephone’s already been robbed

i’ve already been fed the pomegranate

and how can i even relish

those two thirds in daylight

knowing what is soon to return, sat there

at Hades’ right?

there are just as many varieties of medicine as there are varieties of sickness. not everyone’s medicine is the same. what is medicine to one is poison to another; what is poison to one, medicine to another.

health is homeostasis. for two people on opposite ends of a polarity, the exact opposite force will bring each to balance, or homeostasis — or health. it’s so evident, in this way, how two people can have the exact opposite medicine. for one to take the other’s medicine, assuming it to be a one size fits all, they might only further their sickness. 

of course, there do exist psychological adaptogens — those things that exist to bring balance no matter the nature of your sickness. one of the most potent of these is love. the other is femboys

You and me complement each other well. The crack of your thunder, lightning strike temper. My pale face, the clouds, dissociating, gaseous. Lightning makes fire, there’s our home. Am I in there, burning? I can’t tell, I’m up here

I just want to feel something. I wish these words were being engraved into my skin as I wrote them. That’s how they feel. My skin is paper, poetry’s knife will carve patterns onto me for life. I have to be careful. I’m wasting space. I’m reaching the end and the ink blee

What will I do what can I do what can anyone ever do. None of this matters. Every day I wake up with accumulated smog in my mind. Every day I wake up with soot accumulated in my eyes. I wipe with ash stained fingertips. I wash in water that looks like your spit after using that one black flouride-free toothpaste. I go and rinse myself in the filth of man. I go and wash myself in their psychic sewers. I emerge pristine. The filth isn’t mine alone. 

Then I’m a kid. On eggshells do I walk. Crack, crack, crack. My foot, eggshells cracking. Suddenly, above me, thunder cracking. I look up, your face. I didn’t mean to, I should have stepped slightly to the left, you’re right. You’re right. You’re right. (I wish I was dead.)

so often, when people discuss and debate free will, i hear it referenced as a binary, black and white. we either have free will or we don’t, are we slave to instinct or not, are we trapped in a deterministic universe or not.

personally, i wonder if free will exists on a binary at all. maybe it isn’t black and white. maybe we can claim more free will for ourselves through self-awareness and self-work. maybe free will exists on a spectrum, maybe we can gather more free will through rising above instinct and impulse, illuminating our minds and hearts to better gather the ability to choose. maybe this has to do with willing evolution.

maybe part of what can be beautiful about being a human is the evolutionary path not merely being an accident of nature, or an unconscious, sleep-walking process of accidental betterment over many eons, but about the process of participating in our evolution. we can choose to blossom and become better. does a tree choose to grow and reach towards the sun, or does it just happen? i don’t know — but i know that we, ourselves, can willingly choose to grow, to reach sunwards.

oh, i get it. i remember now.

the more you let yourself risk being rejected for who you truly are, the greater are your chances of being loved deeply for exactly that.

i suppose playing it safe rarely yielded high rewards. to leave one’s heart on their sleeve: high risk, high reward.