An All-nighter With Planet Mercury

an all-nighter with planet mercury

four planets in retrograde
and we sit under the full moon to lament
our crazy revolutions. 
mercury, the rare bastard, hides in the shadow of the light,
nothing like the rest of them. a day that lasts hours and a smallness inside your bones, never knowing how to sleep because the night never seems as long. they don’t know what it means to be made of availability, the closest and the remainders of what is left. we both have hands full with drops of this monthly blood, a body’s rejected life shimmering down the side, fingers curved tenderly but still silver slips its way through the cracks.
leaking out to leave empty palms and the moon shines silver too, the stars, who are we to raise our hands and say that we belong in this night with a longing buried deep to leave? too tired to think about what it means. mid-night mercury turned to say unguarded in a hollow voice: i just feel so small, in comparison. so close, and quiet, and less. i feel like i am nothing. (not nothing. never nothing.) underneath such long nights guiding us to oblivion we cannot be nothing on the horizon. i know, mercury sighs, face half-hidden in the blinding light. and still i am so much more and so much less than what i want to be. i can’t find a way to stop myself from spilling out of my hands.

the only truth

that matters i am still breathing no matter how. to be here is a testimony in itself. yes, i’ve answered what you asked no, i did not lie in a single word. bearing myself open, this rib cage cracked in three places and my chest pulled apart from the scrutiny, a fist sized muscle beating itself like i do. to the point where it doesn’t know anything other than to keep going, keep going, your mind gives out long before your body will ever, keep going, keep going, until it hurts more to stop than it does to keep going. once there, you know the truth. the only truth that matters: say it. in words or broken letters. pictures. paintings. fists or cracking voices. the truth is- life is a terrible, awful thing and we are all trying to find the best way to live it. stop pretending it doesn’t terrify you.

uranus has a bad reputation

that they don’t deserve. uranus knows all the whores & fuqbois & faggots. they don’t always deserve it either. there’s a club for people like them: the membership list is written on the insides of bathroom stalls, sent in group texts, gossiped about behind a hand over a mouth familiar with the lips of someone who was in it. uranus doesn’t know why people make jokes & laugh at their expense. everybody’s talking but nobody’s telling them. (doesn’t mean they don’t hear it.) uranus knows all the secrets about drinking till you forget & having sex like it doesn’t matter & the drugs to make you feel better than high. that’s the bad part. all anyone ever says is about how to save someone from themselves. no one ever talks about what happens when they don’t need to be saved. how you can be okay & not be what’s expected. how the “whores” & “fuqbois” & “faggots” grow up to be alright. how they grow past what people think & knowing what you can do is better than not having tried at all. but it is never once easy. nobody ever notices the scars on those whores’ wrists because they’re too busy with the body. nobody looks past the face to see the mind inside. and god forbid they see the love and not the sex that everything is objectified to mean. but if they want it: own it. give them the anarchy, give them the sex, take the reputation that precedes you and walk into the room, two fingers up to yesterday saying fuck the whole universe. tear it down to make your own.

#prayforcharlottesville

i’m so sorry i couldn’t write sooner, but the world keeps crashing down and i don’t know how to write poetry about hatred without reason. i don’t have the metaphors. i can’t write this beautiful. listen, i gotta call you back.

after the silence for prayer: I FOUND ANOTHER BODY TO KEEP SCORE WITH, I FOUND ANOTHER REASON TO BE ANGRY WITH THE WORLD. AT THIS POINT WE SHOULD JUST ACCEPT OUR OWN FAILURE CUT THE LOSSES AND RUN BUT I CAN’T IMAGINE SOMEWHERE WHERE THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN AND I AM SCREAMING AND I AM SCREAMING AND I AM LEFT FEELING SICK AND TIRED AND I’M TRYING WITH ALL OF ME TO HOLD ON, KEEP THAT HOPE, BUT WHAT AM I HOLDING ONTO? THERE IS NOTHING HERE TO LOVE. WHAT KIND OF HATRED HAVE WE ALLOWED TO BREED INSIDE THESE WRETCHED BONES? WHAT KIND OF MAN DOES NOT CONDEMN THE EXECUTION OF ACCEPTANCE?

HOW MANY WORDS DOES IT TAKE TO EXPLAIN THE WAY I CANNOT BREATHE FOR FEAR OF DROWNING IN BLOOD AGAIN?

and everything we do is after the fact. everything we say has no meaning to the dead. #prayforcharlottesville, for everyone these atrocities have taken because we couldn’t find a way to stop them in the first place.

stubborn hope

the capacity of one to do terrible things is the capability to do beautiful if only given different circumstance.

we are born, and the war begins.

the first breath we take is a struggle and so is every one from there on out. when we come headfirst into this gaping maw of a world, the first thing we learn is pain and how everything is made from a wound. later we will feel the place we came from, our mothers holding hands to their chest to say we stole from their bodies and their bones, and if we were stubborn the seam of a scar will run across to show our mark of regret. we did not ask for this and still we are paying reparations for the havoc we have made in the flesh of those we loved. the beginning of learning the cost for our actions and that intent is always harm for good or worse. whether or not we meant to fight:

we are alive, and we fight on.

reverse a movie of war and you will see a different story than the one before. a plane lifting from the ground and bullets unfiring from the edges of holes stitching themselves together, and time is the unstitching and we are the movie in fast-forward to unfurl disaster from our closed fists. we are weapons we have not come equipped to disarm. we follow the paths of our missiles, mothers, bodies hurt by hands yes and not our own to have another life ripped from our bones. whether we want to or not. hold every last piece of you together to remember the first shock of the world: we were made to live, to live and survive, that stupidness that keeps us going through life: down on our knees and we still try to get up, push shaky onto unsteady ground to say come at me again, and again, and again, i won’t ever. give. up. we fight until we are a mess of wounds barely held together with sheer will, but what happens when there is no more war to win, when there is nothing more to lose?

we die. and this is what is left:

stubborn humanity. forgetting, again and again, and thinking we can rise from this past in a different manner than before. to come from anything other than pain and leave more than just our fragile bodies, a lovely imitation of how we fell into this by giving the trembling want of life our startling consensus: if we were given more than what we asked for, cleaving a hole inside something already hollow, we think we may have been something beautiful. we think that thing that we could’ve held inside our empty hands the whole time could have been named hope.

the whole truth

i should start here.

[a FAQ list of things people have said] (no, it didn’t always hurt)

when i was born, the doctor said i was a girl. yes, i am a girl. sometimes.

i learned to love with broken bones. heal the cracks in your heart with pavement, beat a rhythm in the pattern of your soles. bloody knuckles & split lips taste like home, like a kiss, like someone else’s body on mine in a way that isn’t suffocating.

i was fingered before i was kissed, & no i didn’t want it. that wasn’t affection. it wasn’t even a semblance of love.

my first tattoo was at fourteen, illegal & the night after homecoming a little drunk on being wild, we thought we were so cool god, who hasn’t been there, when you’re young & stupid. everybody did it once. in the hours after midnight that little fragile peace gray asked if i wanted something to remember i said yes so we carved a star on my hip & a semi-colon on sky. we were always dreaming. even then we were like this. even then.

bleach tastes awful but i won’t ever really tell you that unless you ask. because no, not everyone needs to know when you’re breaking.

those scars are mine.

do i lie pathologically? probably. it’s a habit of protection i gained from being told i was a bitch, i was too smart, i was too athletic, i wasn’t funny, i wasn’t pretty- i was five foot nothing & not even 120 pounds but i was fat, i wasn’t pretty, i was too much & not enough & cut up all at once.

i’m trusting you with this now because i’m telling the truth. the whole truth.

it did hurt.

i am broken but not irrevocably. i am shaped by the experiences that made me but not defined by those same conditions. i am the knife & the body & the air rushing through this, i’m lying through my teeth to tell you that i’m fine.

there’s a hole in my head and that’s the whole of it. it never never stops for sobriety & suicide but after all this time:

i think i’ll be alright in the end, truthfully.