Sometimes I Wish - 06/04/16

Sometimes, "I Wish I Was A Girl" by Counting Crows plays and I'm never sure if it's okay for me to sing along or if that'll give someone the wrong impression, even if it's just me, singing alone in my bedroom.

Sometimes, I wish I was a boy so I didn't have an existential crisis every time I hear my high-pitched voice or want to bind or a store clerk tells me I'm welcome to use any changing room .... on the ladies' side.

Sometimes, I wish I was a girl so that I didn't have to explain what I "really" meant when I said, "I am so gay for Rey."

Sometimes, I wish I was a boy so that I could hate my curvy hips without feeling like I've disgraced the entire body positivity movement.

Sometimes, I wish I was a girl because my mother always wanted a daughter ad I can't help thinking, would it really be so tough to just suck it up and give her this? My honest existence and happiness aren't that important.

Sometime, I wish I was a boy so that I didn't feel guilty over the little hint of joy I get when anyone mistakes me for one or addresses me as "sir" on the bus.

Sometimes, I wish I was a girl so that no one could accuse me of not being a feminist or of forsaking all the joys of womanhood or of no longer being a suitable role model for young women in physics. Look, what the young people need to know is that they don't have to hide any aspect of themselves to succeed in science, that electrons have no bias against my gender identity, that mathematical proofs will still be as logical no matter who you choose to be, that experiments will work the same no matter who runs or analyses them, and any professor, adviser, or peer who says otherwise can come talk to me. I've got poems and rage set to burn pages and pages, whatever it takes to make them see.

Sometimes, I wish I was a boy so that you'd take me seriously.

Sometimes, "I wish I was a girl, so that you would believe me."

Blunt - 05/18/13

What's a poem ever going to say that you would want to hear, that you would perk up to, that you would wrap in a napkin and slip out of the restaurant to examine later, dainty words on satin or hasty verse on paper, on trash, on the back of a checklist of important things I ran from for fear of failure.  For fear of success?  Words I threw out the back of my mind because they could never be answered or threw out my lips because any more thoughts would only have made them worse.  Blunt words like broken plastic on soft flesh, startling, stinging, strange.  Yet I can't imagine why that metaphor must be the one to come to mind when, I swear, I'm health and happy and better, though even more so with you.  Because I don't need any more heart-broken albums on repeat, but I downloaded all the ones you sent me to, every song you said you loved, but not because you loved them, not because I loved them either, but because it worked out that we both did.  Because you listen to the songs I loved and heard the magic pluck of strings and tap of cymbals with the s's of the lyrics and the poetry lamented to dark symphonies.  Because each thought in your head is alone worthy of love and all of them woven together as your mind, as your soul, well, damn, where do I even begin to begin to beg each readers and listener to let their heart swell with each soft sentence that rambles from your lips and blush when they realize it's sly compliments that they should be scared they can't live up to but aren't because, hell, just because you wouldn't lie to them, now would you?  Because brainy is the new sexy and book recommendations are the new flirtation and song lyrics are monologues that fit my thoughts too perfectly to be sung.  Because you sing, little snip-its of old songs and sad songs and love songs.  Because you watch sad movies and I swear that I don't but I also swear that I'm Vulcan and I think you and I can both guess how much you can trust my swears but who cares?  Because in a few minutes I'll have thought of something a thousand times better to say, the right moves, the right song in the background, the right hand gestures and heaves of my shoulders.  Because it will be too late, so I might as well be blunt.

Because you make me want to write poems, which has never been a good thing before.

Somebody Please Tell Me How To Live - 11/22/11

Somebody please tell me how to live because I’m obviously doing something wrong.  Somebody please tell me how to be alive because I have messed up too many times to try to try again.  Somebody please tell me how to live because I feel like I should be dead, I feel like I’ve reached an end, paused to stare at it, and then crossed into it, disregarded everything that could have and would have ever existed to be in a state of nonexistence and spend hours talking about suicide with a sweet young boy who I thought didn’t know me, but who just might have the potential to.  Now he says that he’d only ever kill himself if he had nothing left to learn from life, and I am envious because I want to have only one path that leads to me ending my life instead of all of them.  He says he thinks about suicide the way the President thinks about nuclear attacks: just as a plan, in case he ever needs it.  And then there’s me: telling him to stop it because he better not ever need it, while I’m actually trying not to plan anything so that when that day comes, and I know it will come, I will have to take a few minutes to plan it then, instead of leaping right into it.  I guess some part of me isn’t ready to die if I’m still hoping that taking a minute to plan will be taking a minute to rethink it.  Or maybe I’m just too scared to see where my mind will take me if I let my thoughts continue on down that path.

And somewhere this turned from prose to poetry, from asking for a path to life to looking for the road to death.  And I’m surprisingly happy for a girl who just run a sharp edge over her leg until she bled.  Maybe it’s endorphins.  Or maybe it’s like I said, just chemicals in my head all messed up and mixed up and happy at all the wrong things and sad at all the right things.  And I mean that like I’m happy with the things that should make me sad and sad with the things that should make me happy, not like I’m happy when I shouldn’t be but sad when I should be resulting in always being unhappy, because I’m happy right now.  I just shouldn’t be.

And I don’t think I want to go to college.  And I don’t want to look at cap and gown packages because right now I don’t want to go to graduation.  I don’t want to make plans to go shopping for prom dresses, because my excuse for not wanting to go to prom isn’t that it’s just too mainstream, but that my brain is unfairly unhinging and wishing for nonexistence before I get that far in life.  All I want to do is nothing.  I want to sit with Christopher Robin in a tree and say, “Oh, nothing,” when someone asks how I’m feeling.  And it won’t be grammatically correct and I will not care.

That.  That right there.  That is what I actually want.  I want to not care.  I want to not care so hard that grammar flies out the window.  I want to not care so hard that I ask that boy out before his computer crashes.  I want to not care so hard that I could drive off a bridge.  I want to not care so hard I die.

My Life as a Tangereen - 08/24/10

nothing rhymes
with orange
not really, at least
some people think
that door hinge
does
but orange
is a lonely
word to use
in a poem