Nietzsches Horses Eyes, Pt. One

Nietzsche’s horse’s eyes, pt. one

how did you get those scars?

cats and curling irons and accidents I say, rattling off excuses in a list three pages long when all I really want to say is knives and needles and scissors and my own two hands, I did this I did this I DID THIS LOOK AT ME AND TELL ME THAT THIS COULD BE ANYTHING BUT MAN MADE, ANYTHING BUT BROKEN AND ABUSED. THIS WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT AND NEITHER AM I- I CANNOT BE WASHED AWAY OR HIDDEN. LOOK AT ME AND TELL ME THAT YOU DO NOT SEE YOURSELF, REFLECTED IN THE BEAST WITHIN MY EYES.

For John, all of the people I love and to celebrate a day with no hatred. Gender is what’s between your ears, not what’s between your legs, and love is love no matter what.

to those who are held back by an ill-fitting skin

my friend, he cried in my arms I held him close and let him weep until he could let it go and talk without fear of trembling.

He told me they had done nothing it was just words that had hurt him so left bruises and cuts and scars all over. They said that there are only girls-who-are-girls and boys-who-are-boys and there was no in between no either/or no and.

He cried for the wrongness of it, the idea that he was not supposed to be who he thought he was. The other day, he said, someone asked me what I was. I didn’t know what they meant I didn’t know I didn’t know

The question was not what are you but who are you and no one seemed to ask.

I told him they were right and he screamed, beating at my chest and crying I was just like them. I held him tight within the cage of my arms and did not let go, waited until he had worn himself out with the agony of perceived betrayal. Then I whispered softly that I had a secret.

I told him that they were right there are no boy-who-are-girls and girls-who-are-boys there are girls, and boys, and either/or and and you are what you choose to be and who you think you are is what you am

You are not a girl-who-is-a-boy and I am not a boy-who-is-a-girl you are a boy and I am a girl Let’s hold hands instead of the broken halves of our hearts.

I don’t mean to demean the struggle you have endured, the part of your being that comes from living for years in an ill fitting skin. That has and always will be you, it has made you and shaped you to be who you are.

But until we realise that people are people and you cannot change that no matter the gender or non gender you are a boy and I am a girl. When we can be recognised as boys and girls

then, maybe, if you want you can be a boy-who-used-to-be-a-girl and I will still call you John.

Through my words he stopped crying and beating against my chest, rested his head on my shoulder and held on for dear life. His skin felt a little less constricting a little less ill-fitting, broken and burnt. With that I said my secret- the one that kept me here.

you are what you think you are and that, my dear, is beautiful.

hello rain.

give me a world cleansed of hatred, discrimination, humanity. tell me, how is the rain not an attempt to wash away the stain of our past lives? a futile offering in the face of our sin. and now: a flood, the myths foretold, to wash away the vestiges of guilt, jealousy and all our other emotions. how have we not been swept away yet? ‘the storm is coming,’ the weather forecaster says; except he doesn’t know the true meaning of rain. it’s not something to be taken lightly. it can take, and it can give life in a cycle only the storm knows. tell me again, what you said- that the rain was just rain and it couldn’t come inside- when I could feel it already in my bones filling up my lungs? tell me how to stop the tide that breaks in my chest. give me a world in need of cleansing, in which we suffer from an evil of our making and the storm will wash away our bodies the lives we pretended were our own. tell me, no i’ll tell you- you could not have stopped this if you tried.

March 1862

your reality is determined by the length of your existence. think about it. when you are born, first, the world is white noise and loud colour vague abstract shapes that speak of a before. before your consciousness, in dark empty black, and you are shaped by the knowledge that there are things in the world much, much older and greater (although, perhaps, at this point you do not know the concept of time, of greater or less than. equality will come later, if you’re lucky.) as you grow so does your reality and all the things crammed into it places, people, faces, times, dates, appointments and things bound for forgetting. pinky promises, the day the Transcontinental Railroad was started, how many people died for freedom before it became something worth living for. places in a country that used to be far away but is now cut by great swathes of railroad, metal tracks crisscrossing like the intersection of thoughts. and if you tried, you could be there in five hours. that’s of course if you can afford it, something else that came along and changed you- flashlights, scattered flowers, and idle hands gone. no more shadows on the wall unless it’s you, late night backlight illumination with your head in your hands the art piece that humanity claims, calls it “a portrait of an ordinary person, work number #7581454” belonging to the collection of insanity. perhaps you could afford it, a one night vacation in Bangkok, Thailand, Paris, France, Salzburg, Germany, Austria, Vienna anywhere but here where the only display is a glass case you’re too tempted to break collections of moments, knickknacks, strands in time that cling to you like threads from the old shirt you used to wear because it matched your eyes. does it match them now, when you are old and reality has grown dim beyond the hazy spots you reach to see? metal tracks you walk along, one foot in front of the other, reciting dates and times and words in languages you cannot remember how to speak. the train’s coming and your reality is reduced down to what it was meant to be; a single spot, bright light tunnel vision against the sky. from start to end it tastes like hope, a journey from one end of the earth to the other. a railroad being built inside your mind.

what kind of person are you?

he said what's wrong? i don't know, i'm just not much of a morning person. it's not the morning, he said gently. oh, well i suppose i'm not much of an afternoon person then either. but you're not a night person, he said. i know that much. well i'm not much of a person in general, i think.

we live and breathe words

i’m overcompensating for forgetting to breathe                               by writing too many words

and trying to make them sound poetic when really there’s no artistic way to say

i woke up one morning and drank bleach just to see how it tasted and bled out

in a bathtub dying a thousand little deaths every time i breathed in

so you could imagine how it feels to be told you’re writing too many words

when all you’re trying to do is remember how it felt to have air in your lungs,

what it tasted like instead of the blood that you vomited all along the white tiles.