thefemmepoetryguy-blog

[thefemmepoetryguy-blog]

There’s a Tree in my Tard that looks like a Paintbrush

There’s a tree in my yard that looks like a paintbrush.

When I first moved into this home it had different furniture, a different smell.

Alcohol dripping down the sink each night from empty cans, slurped by my drunken roommate who’d talk about the pain of being a “real woman”.

Because when I came out as trans, she stumbled up to me and slurred “this is a little weird for me, I love you but it’s hard for me”.

This house has held my drunken nights, bursting through the front door and ripping off clothes, throwing myself into the bed with beautiful people who I barely remember.

And crying all the time, missing him so much I felt like somebody was grabbing my insides and squeezing.

Cackling with my friends and watching the L word, only to realize I wasn’t an L word.

Falling in love for the first time, again.

Terrifying.

After the drunk roommate moved out I scrubbed the walls, we shampooed the rugs.

Swept away the ash and dust and wandering hands of drunk deadbeats that she brought home from the bar.

Because I shoved one off after he called me “lesbian” while slipping his hand up my shirt.

These walls watched me shove that motherfucker like fury and cry for two days.

There’s a feeling like dust in my eye whenever there’s a spill or a mess, but I clean it.

I haven’t called out of work in four years.

My arms are sore from cleaning, but if I stop my mind wanders.

The darkest places.

The abuse, the trauma, the punching, hitting, fighting, tearing, yelling.

I can’t survive anymore.

I can’t.

I need gentleness and kindness.

And I need to stop getting my heart broken...

But these walls know that I love hard, even if it’s not often.

This house is my safe place.

There are imperfections, but I’ve shined it well.

I eliminated the odor, busted the ghosts.

I sanded it down until it was safe, and pleasant, and kind, and warm.

And now?

Now I’m okay, but I’m sensitive and I’m worn down.

And what I’m realizing is that I need to sand myself down until my mind is a safe place to be.

I need to reconcile the trauma, the abuse, the hitting, the punching.

But I don’t know how, and this house is safe but it’s made of wood and it doesn’t talk back.

And the people in it can’t fix me, because the people that I love this much can’t be mechanics for my broken heart.

I don’t know where to go from here, I’ve done the steps, I’ve cleaned up the mess.

I have my ducks in a row and they’re quacking and I’m getting paid and I’m getting grades and all that shit.

But the mental work hasn’t been done and I can’t stop hurting.

I can’t stop hurting.

I can’t stop remembering all of it all the time.

It’s like a floodgate that opens from time to time and when it does a lump sets up camp in my throat and my laughter becomes stale and inauthentic.

And I don’t know how to tell people how I feel because I can hardly feel.

If I could ride above this pain I’d grab you by the face and tell you that I love you and tell you that I’m passionate and tell you everything.

But I can’t because I see everything through the lenses of trauma and my mental illness won’t let me grab onto anything.

The tree in my lawn was once tiny, but now it has branches and leaves and it looks like a paintbrush.

The hole in my heart was once tiny, but it burst at the membrane and became an ocean.

This house was once dirty, but it grew arms and wrapped itself around me.

[thefemmepoetryguy-blog]

What the fuck are memories anyway?

When I hear windchimes I smell lilacs

When I was small I used to clang my hand along the fence next to the middle school

Watching older kids puff puff under the tree

You know the smell that hits your nose when you leave a public pool house? That skin peachy fresh smell? The one that craves for ice cream to be licked under summer sweet orange skies?

Pink fluffy bits dot the sky and I count them

My dad and I used to hunt for treasures

He used to take me into the forest for weeks at a time

The most glorious part of the woods with him was that I was never scared

My thought after worry

Dads 6’4”. Dad can build anything, fix any car. Dad is invincible.

Dad knew where the morel mushrooms were, dad found the geodes and the sweet old man along Highway 12 who sawed then open with a wet saw.

I picked one painted like a landscape on the tundra

I read a book once of a girl who lived in the tundra her whole life, I wanted nothing more.

I remember the Columbia teeming with Steelhead as dad and I canoed. I caught one, he told me I was his favorite.

Because I wasn’t uptight like my sisters.

I wasn’t scared like my mom.

I remember hopping from stone to stone in my backyard, wondering why my Superman left me.

Wondering why he was invincible in the woods and couldn’t protect us from the outside, or from him.

I remember wishing my mom were home, wishing I could explain that my heart was broken because he let me down.

My sister and I used to be best friends, my sisters and I used to get along so well.

I remember when we were best friends.

Now they go on trips with each other, and I sit at home looking at old pictures of us together.

Because for me, our relationships at their strongest will always be in the past. And their relationships with each other will carry on into the future.

I miss being small.

I miss laying in sun-drenched blankets in the summertime and looking up at the clear blue Ellensburg sky.

Catching bugs in the lawn.

There was no computer, only VHS tapes to be watched while my sisters got ready for school in our small, shared, pea green bathroom.

Covergirl sprinkled on the counter, my mom looking for her white felt hat so she could go to work.

I wonder what my mom was thinking.

I ate hot dogs for breakfast until our roommate Virginia moved in.

She was a college student at CWU and smelt like flowers.

Vicky made flan and arroz con leche for my birthday and reminded my momma how to relax.

She read me pieces Are You There God, it’s Me Margreat every night before bed.

I miss being small, I miss my grandmothers perfume and clutching to her as she read me stories.

I miss watching Grampa Bob paint Britney Spears with blue skin and tell me about philosophy...and how he got fired from Professor jobs.

I miss the strange funky characters that I grew up with and the feeling of knowing what art is.

I feel as though I’m losing the flowery, painterly parts of me that created this sensitive and willful mind.

I’m stiff, I’m stressed, I’m academic but for good reason

And the memories? They’re just memories.

But the art, it will last forever.

[thefemmepoetryguy-blog]

My feet are slipping

I am traveling, scaling, fumbling upward

A giant mountain to a narrow tip of sharp brittle ice

As I grapple for hold I feel the water

Sliding over my hands as I grasp and tremble

If I don’t get a GPA worth mentioning I won’t get into grad school

If I don’t work enough I won’t pay my rent

These are the truths

The truths that can’t be swayed

And I am sitting like a tree trunk planted to the front rows of classrooms which still echo with male and female

But I am here

As neither

I see through the cracks

I take the truth and bend it waveringly

Wrapping it around my neck, squeezing tight

I can’t breathe when I confront them

Because if I don’t tell my professors that if we teach Female is XX and Male is XY chromosomes in class another student will feel inclined to die

Every quarter students feel inclined to die

I feel inclined to scream

To cover myself over them and protect them from harm

Camping trips they’ll never be invited to, smiles they’ll never receive because they’re strange

What is it to be normal, when we all have this one life to live?

I don’t know the future and it kills me.

I hold this person in my arms and hold them tight

At times I feel like I fooled him.

Because I never told him I might fail.

[thefemmepoetryguy-blog]

Two year when you're 23

I'm crossing the bridge

Of what it's name is something of

I'm not old yet but anytime I turn on a TV or radio I feel outdated

I'm like that pleated low waist skirt

Cute and fun in 2004

Back alley current trash heap

Value Village color of the day

Help me I don't know how to pay bills but I'm so in debt that I rock back and forth anytime anybody mentions credit scores

Solidly deliver me to adulthood I am flailing

I hold a body in my arms at night that could fleet or fly at any given moment

Bond of ours is the only thing I'm sure of, though

What is that nonsense?

I don't know when the last time I washed my hair was

But I cut my fingernails regularly so people will know

Gay, gay, unapologeticly and whiskey dipped gay

Marry me for five seconds and leave me in a hurry so I can have a story to tell

I just want a story to tell

And then, a survey asks

Not an essay for school, I am a dropout

Not a question on a doctors intake, I can't afford a doctor

A survey that will deliver my $7 for a pack of smokes

Survey it asks

"Where will you be in 2 years"

2 years it isn't a long time but ask a 23 year old where they'll be in two years and expect a lie

Because I might say grad school I might say the peace corps

But know

Know that when a 23 year old tells you absaloutely anything that it is as brittle as the bone of an 80 year old woman because 23 years old could be anything

I don't even know my gender I don't even know what love is I could tell you what size pants I am but that was different 5 months ago and will be different 5 months from now

23 year olds? They can do anything.

And just so?

We can do nothing.

I am a product of fighting, I am a product of casual war, I am a product of debt and sorrow and inequality and I am here to scream

And I might just do nothing

But also, I might just be your everything

[thefemmepoetryguy-blog]

Picasso: Portrait de femme (Marie-Thérèse) 1939

[thefemmepoetryguy-blog]

[thefemmepoetryguy-blog]

Stories I tell

"When I'm telling a story, words don't always come out Sometimes I'm telling the story when a coworker catches me catching my breath It happens in the night sometimes when I open my old iCloud and find his name with a winking face in the contacts Or notice that whenever I try to type "in" an ∞ symbol pops up because he programmed it into my phone I tell a story when I leave the room early at Holiday and my family thinks I'm excluding myself but really I just can't escape the noise There is a noise in nearly every room which I enter that I drown in It's not even audible but it is still as loud as a freight train I want to fucking breath It's the sound of every relationship evaporating the sound of my personality being whittled down to that of a robot my feelings being invalidated because how could somebody like me feel I tell a story I tell a story when I can't focus on work or school because every other second another friend is suicidal and another friend is telling me that I can't feel responsible while another friend tells me that I'm the cause That we are all the cause We didn't pay attention pay no mind to the way that queer people are treated degraded invalidated by over 50% of this country and 50% is a good statistic I fucking can't tell this story anymore I'm tired I'm so tired of explaining why I'm anxious why I'm angry why I'm going goddamn crazy and don't tell me that I'm irrational You don't get it I tell a story off the bat because you don't need to clock me I'm already androgynous I tell a story because my existence and expression is controversial and I'm a walking article to be read judged and forgotten about I'm a lifetime freaky body episode people google this body of mine for fetish answers drunken laughter answers This is my home I tell a story because I'm constantly fearful and worried and people wish I'd be less dramatic about it I am fragile The only thing that keeps me going is the fact that I have a story to tell And I'm telling it, aren't I?"

#queer #trans #transgender #ftm #gay #lgbtq #lgbt #poetry #queer poetry