Poetocracy

When I first saw you,
you seemed so cold
you could wear a crown of snowflakes in summer.
I, on the other hand,
wore an unfortunately placed scar on my left wrist.
I fell down the stairs, I swear.
And no that’s not just an excuse spoken
in closed door rooms. Trust me,
I’ve been there too.

I’ve never sensed divinity by walking through a doorway,
have never felt it in a sanctuary or a cemetery
and certainly not while standing in front of a crucifix.
I only get a sense in essence, action, flesh and bone
decisions.
Your body kept me together
that night in Iowa
when I should have been fangirling over Andrea Gibson and Katie Wirsing.
Instead, you were guiding me out of an auditorium
while I was making frantic phone calls,
willing my friend to answer and sound coherent.
A death and a drugging broke me that night,
bent me into the fetal position on a hotel bed.
It was the first time I fell asleep in your arms.

So last night,
when you fell asleep in mine,
and our hearts started beating in time,
I tried to breathe a thousand simultaneous
thank yous and apologies. 

So back to that topic of divinity…
I think the fastest way to close my mind
is to bang on my eardrums.
Never give me a narration of faith,
I don’t respond to speech.
If you crucify me against all my past lives,
chances are I’ll use the nails for something else,
Which is why I think I’ve grown to respect you so much…
you never let rhetoric come between
the ground and your feet.

On National Coming Out Day,
you came out as Beyoncé,
making me think that perhaps
what I thought was a crown of snowflakes,
might have been a halo.

My biggest hope,
is that we continue to converse
through our actions.
And if I’m being honest,
your silences always sound most like what I need to hear,
and I am grateful for that.

mayleeesssaaa:

schnidlier:

We ask President Obama to urge the FDA to allow the majority of healthy gay and bisexual men to donate blood. Current blood donor policies are largely inconsistent, imposing significantly less restrictive deferrals to heterosexual men and women who engage in high-risk sexual behavior, yet banning gay and bisexual men who are HIV-negative, consistently practice safe sex, or are in monogamous relationships. The American Red Cross, American Association of Blood Banks, and America’s Blood Centers all support reforming the current policy. Other countries have already reformed their policies to allow gay and bisexual donors. Thousands of desperately needed pints of blood are kept out of the depleted national blood supply each year as a result of this unjust exclusion. Reform is needed today!

Signing this only takes a few seconds, but can make so much needed change. DOOO IIIIIT. 

(via tooasexyformycat)

She is
what everyone does, and frankly should,
want in a best friend.
You see, 
when you are in a strong sense of self,
she’ll have no problem whatsoever with
sitting you down and challenging you,
forcing you to see
new ideas and new perspectives.
She’ll make you take stock of all the problems
you have power and control over,
and then she’ll ask you to take
initiative in resolving them.

And when your inner self is weak,
she’ll be gentle, speak softly,
dig you out with your own shovel,
and guide you away 
from your darkest places.
She’s the kind of person 
you want to tell your secrets to,
the one you want to travel with,
the one you want to be sitting beside
to catch the northern lights,
and especially,
the one with whom you can feel content
when waiting out a storm.
She is the ideal partner,
both in crime and kitchen disasters.

Her giggle might as well be champagne,
but disappointment in her voice
will turn your guts to lead,
make you curl up and despise every fiber of your very existence.

Sometimes, often times,
she’ll say what you need to hear.
Other times, she’ll just watch
and hold you for as long as you may need.
I swear it’s all a quiet thing
since there’s certainly no touting of 
wisdom, no lofty air,
just her bare feet planted firmly
on the ground,
(though those same feet do cause her to flutter)
and her eyes always
looking up, always meeting yours.

When all those dead poets 
wrote about crazy connections
and friendships and soul mates,
I swear they mixed her essence in with the ink.
And when rough waves finally switched
to calmer seas,
the sailors gave thanks for her company they kept.
And when you find yourself
failing to sleep under obscured full moons,
she’s the voice you want whispering in your ear.
Because no matter what you face
now and in the future,
with a friend like her,
nights like these will one day be 
stories told around warm fires
with even warmer spirits.

You’ll give thanks then,
when the raw wood you now must carve
into a life
maybe wasn’t as soft as you were hoping.
But she…
she was a knife, 
sharp and sure,
that helped you turn it into something
worthy of admiration.
Perhaps most importantly,
above all else,
she makes you 
want to
be the same for her.

When we first bought our baby Betta fish,
we didn’t know its biological sex.
We just knew it was cute, completely 
white with a splotch of red on its forehead.
Not wanting to impose gender norms,
we settled on a gender neutral name, 
Cuddles,
and a gender neutral pronoun, 
it, never okay when referring to humans, 
but we figured it would be okay to call our fish,
it, or they, 
even though grammatically incorrect.

Cuddles is bigger now,
and that splotch of red 
has spread to its entire body,
though it turns pale at times,
whether from a lack of light, or a reaction
to its water purification drops,
I still don’t know.
Cuddles is a welcome presence, the way 
they 
seem to swing dance with their reflection.
A calm, pleasant fish overall,
the only issue arises when I 
need to clean its tank.

You see, we had a bit of an emergency
the first time we used a net.
Cuddles got stuck, and after a few
agonizing moments spent
wondering if we were going to accidentally
suffocate or cripple our fish,
Cuddles popped out.
We resolved to never use the net
again.

These days I use a measuring cup.
The 1/3^rd is slightly too small,
and ½ slightly too big,
but no matter what I use,
Cuddles slips into corners
where too much force 
might equal squished.
It floats there, fins casually waving,
luring me in a false sense of triumph
as the white plastic slips underneath the scaly body.

And then it’s at the other end of the tank,
hiding behind the Buddha statue.

So we continue our
aquatic cat and mouse game,
I don’t push it for fear of harm,
but all the while 
I’m building up
a steady frustration 
with fragile swimming things.
I mean really, it’s been a week
and uneaten fish flakes
are beginning to collect at the bottom.
Let me tell you,
a half-gallon of water doesn’t quite cover up
the smell.

I have to be in class in ten minutes,
and Cuddles still won’t let me capture it.

I think PETA might have had something
with that whole sea kitten business,
but honestly Cuddles is less
kitten 
and more puppy,
less Garfield
and more Marley
except Cuddles doesn’t blink,
just stares…
mocking me.

It’s the first time you remember tasting banana cream pie,
a single slice in see through plastic,
tasting like a mix of Laffy Taffy and crayon.
Welcome to the hospital’s fifth floor lounge,
where an aquarium houses a sucker fish your 13-year-old cousins
somewhat affectionately call Munchums,
Padraig Harrington plays a golf tournament on TV,
and you can’t quite get the smell to leave your lungs.
Brochures listing every kind of cancer you can think of
rest on a stand along the bookcase, 
and you’re just hoping for one or two more “good” days,
something to negate the flood of tears you’ve shed
against the walls,
on rose colored couches,
sitting at the public use computer, typing up a CaringBridge update,
trying to sound put together.
Here there are flashbacks, 
the lounge hasn’t changed much since you were last here,
six, and eight years ago.
Three Christmases and it still feels the same;
they still bring out the tiny trees,
can the workers even differentiate
between the years?

How do you hug your grandmother,
shorter than your 17-year-old self,
knowing she’s fixing to bury her third child.
Nothing takes away tears like that,
stops the sting of cold rooms,
trying to be comfortable for chemo and 
morphine patients.
Bring sweatshirts, prepare to shiver.
A lounge doesn’t get you far enough away
from individual rooms,
doesn’t provide relief from hours of IV drips,
mechanical beeps,
a periodic switching out of platelet bags,
bloody noses that don’t stop
and other bad signs.
It’s entirely too much red,
punctuated by the occasional
half-hearted joke,
or when you really get into it,
a boisterous fit of reckless story-telling,
ending in another solitary walk
to find a quieter hallway,
and the selfish chance
you’ll find someone in more misery than you.
Usually you can find it in a room
housing someone elderly and alone,
the way their eyes drift up
and wonder about all the things
no one ever feels ready to.

It’s only something you survive
and then wonder how you did it,
marathon stretches—
10 days, 
5 days,
however many days, 
you’ve lost track of time,
measure it instead in cups of coffee,
and trips down elevators.
And when you return to your own bed,
maybe the smell is sticking to your skin,
or else is imprinted on your mind,
because you can still smell it,
years later.

gabrielgadfly:

Last night, you said
you wanted to find the real me,

but you look with your hands
and your mouth
and don’t find anything there.

You look for me
in all the wrong places.

This body is just a tangle.
It is just a snare. I am caught
and must write myself out
of this snarl of limbs
and into something
that can contain me.

Look, I am a pothole full of rain,
the kind that holds up a mirror
for the sky and says Look,
you are beautiful,
even if you are just blue,
from one end to the other.

I am the holes a woodpecker
has hammered into a telephone pole,
and the poems teenagers
have scrambled up and put into them,
like the prayers pious old men
pack into the cracks of temple walls.

I am a little green moss
in a grey parking lot

and that must be enough for you.

This poem © Gabriel Gadfly. Published Feb 6, 2013