You have two responsibilities:
- Be who you are.
- Never impede on another person’s right to be who they are.
Tag: self healing
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Sometimes, the old Catholic in me
rears its pious head, telling me
that prayer looks like aching knees
and the scrubbing of my shame,
until the grime of my very aliveness
soon after builds again—
but that gentler voice within
blows this smoke away
with but a whisper,
asking me how I want to pray today,
and what part of my body would like to do the praying?
is it my feet,
dancing in the grass,
is it my hands,
tracing an oak?
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There are some people who will make you feel like a fool
through moving lips, an upturned chin.
Like putting my spirit on its knees, commanding I listen
to all but my heart.
There are some people who, through their deafening, humble silence,
still make me feel like a fool, but only because
they make me hear the message I’ve been ignoring, that quiet but sure one,
a tea light in me, a brazier in them.
That silent teacher said not a thing, but only pointed to that voice
in my breast.
-
my revolutionary ideologies
are capable of utter destruction.
do you know how loud a hushed mouth is?
listen: there is no greater noise.
a hurricane of silence.
I made myself delicate,
public displays of my underbelly.
I dressed a fortress in a house of cards:
meanwhile,
I saw the straw that they called a castle.
silent observation: toppled.
at least to my eyes.
there is no gaze more piercing
than a gentle one.
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there’s so many different parts of you capable of picking up a pen and writing.
don’t let the perfect hand
of aesthetic sense
pick up your pen.
she writes beautifully,
but her wrists are cuffed.
don’t let the hand of order,
of patterning,
take your pen:
he is exacting,
& will entrap you
in his cell bar grid lines.
but the base of your spine
is illiterate, and your gut
communicates in grunts:
still—
they’re better suited for the task.
the animal of your being
cannot weave falsehoods.
Dive, Persephone,
into your underworld—
for that is where you
and where the poem
hide.
Remember: your depths cannot lie.
-
to labor over a poem,
or to splatter it:
ink on a page.
to tell your reader of liberation,
to twirl freely
on life’s dance floor,
to open the cage
they’ve freely stepped into and locked—
while you labor
over such wishes of merriment,
while you struggle
to say what you plainly feel,
to tell yourself no, over and over—
this is encouraging medicine
using poison as its ingredients,
writing
like an expert on freedom
from the inside of a cell.
-
Yes, yes, yes, my heart? What is it now?
After so long silencing you, I will answer your call forevermore.
I had so much to account for:
voicemails my heart left me throughout my youth.
I played them back and wept
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Some of us would rather die slowly than all at once. Like denying yourself the mercy of the end’s sweet embrace— instead of falling off the cliff face, you take the slowest descent down suffering’s spiral staircase. The destination’s the same— but you take the scenic route.
You can kill a flame by throwing water on it, stealing the air from its lungs. It coughs, it sputters, it dies before your eyes. Or, you can steal the logs from under, one by one— you can watch it cling to what fuel remains. You can watch it emaciate itself until all that’s left is bone. You can watch it crumble.
I took a log from under myself so life couldn’t. I stole the breath from my own lungs, refusing to let someone who filled them walk away, leaving me gasping. It was the chemotherapy of the spirit, the indiscriminate erasure of all that I was, if only to escape that place of pain.
Self-harm, it takes casualties: innocents taken in the line of fire. You raise the blade, you hope to excavate the virus. Healthy tissue’s taken with, civilians slain— all the while, the enemies replicate.
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The sapling does not tell itself: once I am tall, once I am strong, once I am at last a great oak, then and only then will I be worthy of sunshine.
We so often tell ourselves: once I am great, once I am deserving, then and only then will I love myself, then and only then will I be worthy of love— as if love is not the very sunshine we need to grow tall, grow strong.
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purified in the stream of hunger, eating the sin off my bones. self-subsistent self-destruction. if less of me exists, maybe I’ll exist less. longing for freedom, for lightness. gravity loses its hold.
will I be made worthy if there is less of me? is the price of love emaciation? flesh falls off the bone. tainted flesh, tainted flesh. find your cell in our red light district, snare a passerby. the less of you there is, the more noticed you will be. you grew in size, began to hide in plain sight. just longing for someone’s eyes to get stuck, to stop their roaming, to decide that in the rough, you are the diamond.
but I was taught it is my own flesh that obscures the diamond. I pursed my lips to expose my own worthiness. I pursed my lips, but starved for love. I pursed my lips because I was starved for love. I pursed my lips and only grew hungrier than I already was. who denies themselves, hoping for the hunger to abate?
make me holy, make me holy. the price of holiness is your own damnation. you long to be the idol, the price is truth. glitter thrown on lead.
THE CLOSET MYSTIC 