Renovation

Sometimes the velocity of a thought is all you've got, and just when you think you can stop, you notice the brakes are locked, the chains are tied, and no matter what else you try, you're still speeding ahead with your foot glued to the gas, and you're not dead but you feel like you've got shattered glass all up inside yourself, so you sit still, keep chill, fall into the groove and try not to move because you want to keep yourself whole, stay in control, find that missing piece of your soul or whatever you please. It's not something they can see except when they look at your knees and scan straight up they can follow the scream and see where it's stuck, and good luck because discovery leaves little room for recovery, but no one says you can't knock out a few walls here and there.
Throw in a jacuzzi while you're at it.

Locomotive

enough about falling let's talk about rising let's rise
sunrise high rise brown bag of o fries. and cheap beer.
it's not loneliness or solitude. somewhere in the middle we dance
toward each other and enough is enough no more being sore head
to the floor and i rise for
you
i heard you
coming like the train
head-on hitter
on white matter tracts

from Two Truths and a Lie

"From readysetgo
with the training bra on
my world was training me
training me to be.
It's funny what a piece of clothing
will train you to see."

"Didn't say a word
didn't move its lips
just stared into my eyes
(its eyes my eyes),
and she told me.
Right to the back of my soul
I heard him say,
'You know, maybe it's supposed to be this way.'"

"You ever see yourself in some misplaced mirror
or on the reflective foundation of a skyscraper?
You're walking along to the music in your head
and you trip
when you see your reflection.
You trip
on how different you look from what you thought,
maybe just since you stepped out the door
maybe
your whole life.
You trip
maybe you stumble."

"You've gotta know how to make an entrance--how
to be gracious and take it in stride--if you want to
survive."

"But sometimes, sometimes there's just no other way to go about it but to step into that spotlight and take a bow; because you know what they say, don't you? It's not so much coming out, as it is coming through."

"What if this isn't what I want?
What if this isn't what I need?
What if my family disowns me?
How will I ever get another date?
What if testosterone kills me?
What if I don't like my body after surgery?
What if nobody will love me anymore?
Am I the weirdest person in the world?
What if I won't love myself?
Am I crazy to think this could be normal?
What if I get cancer and die?
What if they botch a surgery?
What if I come through, and want to go back?
What if I die?
What if I die?
What if I die?
What will I find?
Where will I find myself
if I don't know myself anymore?
What if I die?
When will I know what I want?
When will I know who I am?
When?
When will I know?"

"I wish I could tell you everything, but no matter how many stories I tell I can't figure out how to end this story that never really ends for me. All I know is what I've learned so far: Be a man about it. Look people in the eye, shake hands firmly, say thank you, and know when to leave."

Fall Routine

compartment with an internal view
on the 3rd floor
black five on a green door

mix-match batch of laundry
book stack, back pack
stolen times, signs, and memories

damp air damp hair
leaning stares, shuttle stop
drop and (buzz) roll

class on class off tune out
come out in an elevator
every time I hit number 6

Pitt. Band. Pitt. Band Pitt Band Pitt. Band.
cold metal hard wood loud good
late night taped white. show time.

trek home sleep alone. phone rings.
come over come closer please come
together lights out. snooze button sunrise.

compartment with an internal view
1st floor
her numbers on a red door.

Streaming Brain

When I was a little girl is funny
because I never was
A cold breeze is a distraction.
At this point anything is and I just stop trying to be creative with this and I just let the words fall down. I wish.
I'm sick as fuck and don't need this to be my life right now.
I need to worry about school.
I need to focus.
Stop thinking about it
it'll just go away.
Wrong.
It stares at me every morning, which is fair
I guess
because so do they.
Sometimes it makes me laugh, sometimes cry.
This poem is ass.
A cold breeze reminds me that something else is out there
It might be the answer I need
I still hear helicopters. carrying bodies.
And I think of tear gas and riot cops
broken windows and bus rides out of state
of people who just wanted to go home.
The smoke is so thick that my tears have nowhere to go.
They keep pushing me back,
but I need to go home too.
Police to protect society.
Rules, norms, stereotypes
police. protect.
Brutalize, Berate, Batter, Bludgeon, Bash, Bombard, Blitzkrieg
abuse. tread on me.
Friday night dinner and drinks. And everything felt better once I told him. 4 words seemed enough.
And maybe I was just drunk and (but?) that was our best night ever.
Forced to go. Wrong. Gladly so.
I could tell the night was going to be fun
when i got yelled at for being in the wrong bathroom
(How do I tell anymore?)
And just smiled to myself as the door closed upon the silence.
Drunken cab ride home. Happiness for real this time, guys.
Maybe because I let a few people know
that this might be where I want to go
And some chose
to follow
me.
I dropped a bomb and no one's dead so things must be pretty good.

Pre-Voyage Ranting

Nothing horrendous happened today, but it ended up being one of those absolutely shitty days because so many little things occurred today that either pissed me off or depressed me deeply. And sometimes they did both. I'd never been happier to get out of practice early than today, and I suppose that feeling has been building for months now. I'm just proud of myself for not snapping right there. But an hour later, I ended up alone in the bathroom of Posvar writing a "secret" that no one will read--that will most likely be rubbed away by the night maintenance staff. It doesn't make sense that feelings like that should wash away so easily. I copied it down because I thought it was important, but I don't want to put it all here. It's not like it was terribly long, but there's a point in it that sticks with me now more than the others, and I'll bring it up because it's not necessarily part of my current psychological crisis, though it is related.
I'm never going to understand why it is just absolutely unacceptable for me to do certain things, while other people can do the same things and to a greater degree without others thinking anything of it, though I get bitched out for it. I'm really getting annoyed with it. And I don't say anything because I'm already the odd one out. I'm the intrinsic outcast. In existing, I am already breaking rules and pushing things just a bit too far. And sometimes I just want that to stop. There are so many times when I want to be considered normal--for people to think that things I do are part of my personality and unique to me and to stop comparing me to other people with whom I feel I have nothing in common, except maybe that one thing down there.

Maybe I've been thinking about this so much because people wouldn't have to look past the outside to see the real me. I feel like my body is a brick wall between me and the rest of the world. If I didn't have to worry about it, how much of an easier time would I have relating to people? No matter what I put on, people make assumptions that are never going to be quite right, and while that is probably true for everyone else in the world as well, like I said before, I'm already in the red. Nothing about me would be weird if I hadn't been born this way. Not having a side to go to can be pretty fucking lonely. And maybe that's something that's never going to change anyway. Why do I feel so far away from everyone? Do I have to fight to get past the same wall? This is absurd.
I'm doing everything I can not to cry because there's no point in shedding tears for these fucking bastards. There's no point in crying because maybe people don't even realize what they are doing. Maybe nothing is even happening and I'm just insane. This is just one of those times when I feel that I don't belong anywhere, and it's hitting me pretty hard right now. I'm so fucking worried about this trip. I'm worried about spending that much time on a bus with people and trying to relate to them, not all of them because I know that I've got good friends in some of them, but many of them. I just hate when I say something and everyone just fucking stares at me like it's the weirdest thing they've ever heard. And this happens almost everywhere I go, and it's been happening my entire life. I know I'm not stupid, but I feel incompetent when I try to initiate a conversation and it just dies right in front of me. And this always has to happen in front of a shitload of people, of course.
And maybe the world and I will never quite understand each other no matter what I do. I wish I could figure it all out. I wish everything that other people did made sense to me. I wish I knew how to act all the time. I wish I knew more of the rules. But maybe I wouldn't follow them anyway because some of them are just so fucking stupid, and I don't see how they could fool anyone. Do people think this world would fall apart if we just cut the fucking bullshit already? Or do people just want to spare their own feelings by attempting to spare the feelings of others every once in a while? Drop your egos and grow some fucking balls. I have no problem when people call me out on shit. I just can't stand hypocrisy, and I can't stand wasting time. I really don't know what I'm supposed to do. About anything. This is absurd.

Looking Back

From my sophomore year of high school:

I became popular only after showing that I was the strongest kid in the class. I was one of the most athletic, and I always have been. I can;t lie about liking sports. It just feels good to run around, even now. I didn't show my strength in sports, though. I beat people up. I did it for laughs. I did it for FUN. I was awful. I'm sickened by the way I used to torture poor John Moran with his lisp and dyslexia. Damn...But if it hadn't been for a major life change, I probably would still be that way, and I wouldn't be half as wise as I am today. A change in schools doesn;t seem like a big deal for a nine-year-old with no friends. I didn;t think it was at first. I was the same as always. I was quiet, rambunctious in my own respect, and I had short hair. It wasn't a good thing. That hair was probably the worst of things. Children are very superficial, and it is not by their own choosing on most occasions. These children were different. I got such a beating that first week of school. Boys weren't afraid to hit me, and girls would never stick up for me. I looked like a guy. I acted like one. Everyone thought I was nuts. I became severely depressed for the next 3 years, and I gained a lot of weight. It was a lot for me. Part of it was probably puberty, but part may have been the 6 pack of coke and bag of chips I was used to eating every day. I wouldn;t eat sometimes. I'd get sick, and then I'd binge. I'd sleep for almost full days, and I would be constantly absent and late to school. I never wanted to go. I contemplated suicide at ten years old. It's hard to imagine. Nobody understood. I was a little kid. I couldn;t possibly have a true traumatic situation on my hands. I'd get beaten up and taunted all the time. Even my best friend deserted me. I had no one, but I learned. I learned what an awful person I had been. I had done these exact things to other students, even more helpless than I, and the fullness of it hit me like a ton of bricks. It didn;t take long for me to realize my errors. I was always good at that. I was at a different level of thinking, and I was able to comprehend abstract things very well, a skill of which most fourth graders know nothing. In retrospect, I was very smart, but I was also very stupid for believing that I was the only one with that kind of problem. My brother had the same problems. He was older, and he knew it all. But we never got along. I couldn;t trust him. My parents were adults. They weren;t accustomed to the new age problems. I didn't believe they had ever been in these situations before. I was only half right. My dad was a bully. He indirectly admitted that through his years of telling me that it was okay to stand up for yourself when no one else would. He would encourage us to beat sense into people that deserved it.
That was a fatal flaw of his that I can't forget, and he knows that. But I wouldn't change any of it if I had the chance. It's all helped me. That is my past, however remote it may seem now. That story is who I am. Ninety percent of my philosohpy on life, my reason for living, the basis of everything I have ever done and will do has been shaped by the events that occurred in those 3 years. I've learned a lot about myself in my life. I know a lot of things that I have never told anyone. Nobody knows very much about my past, and that is probably in part because I never told anyone much, and it is also in part that I have a hard time distinguishing one event from the next. They all play together in my mind like scenes from a movie. Things seem condensed, but they happened every day. It was a true nightmare, but it was an effective lesson for me. It was probably the only thing that could have shown me reality. I was always one for the hands on experience of things.

Identity

Last semester I took a course called Deaf and Society. Since a large part of this course involved examine Deaf identity, our professor gave us an exercise in determining for ourselves the most important components of our respective identities. We were told to list five things about ourselves, and as we finished our lists, we each walked to the board to jot them down. Some walked more purposefully than others; some more hesitantly than others. I was freaking out because I had recently begun defining another part of my identity--carving it out of the marble--and I was worried that it wouldn't be ready to reveal. But that's not the part that interests me most. Every list began in the same way. "Woman." "Man." Is this really how people define themselves above all else? For me, having that at the top of the list seems stupid. It tells me nothing about that person at all, though it may provide me with a huge list of stereotypes about that particular classification. Let's just say that my list didn't begin that way. In fact, neither one of those words was even on my list. Even our professor's list began with that item, and I was almost certain that it would have begun with "Deaf" since that seems to be the most prominent part of her identity. She mentioned that Man/Woman always comes first for her because it's just so obvious, so inherent, a basic fact of life, something that just IS. I was astounded, but only for a moment. That's the way a lot of people see things. They don't even question these things. Well, you know what? It's not always as obvious as you might believe. And it's never as clear cut as you think. And it's not something that needs to be the sun of our social universe. And it scares me that not one other person in that room firstly mentioned a quality of personality or something truly defining to the individual. Instead, I saw a homogeneous set of responses that made me want to scream. People weren't reporting who they think they are. They were reporting the presence of a certain set of genitals and/or hormones. This isn't to say that you can't be proud of being whatever gender you are. But is that really the most important thing that you can list about yourself? Is that really how you would like to be defined if you could only choose one word to do it? And maybe I'm just really weird in that I've spent pretty much my entire life without ever placing myself into either one of those categories. It's not like I wasn't aware of my own body, and it's not that I forced myself to believe anything. I grew up being a person, doing whatever I wanted and being however I wanted without questioning whether the behavior was appropriate to my perceived gender role. People always say things like boys shouldn't do this or girls shouldn't do that, but that never mattered. Yes, I did a lot of stereotypically male things, but I also enjoyed a lot of pastimes that are considered female-typical behavior. It just seems silly to say that you can't like something because you have a vagina. But the whole time, I never really conceptualized myself as fitting into the group of girls at my school. And while I always felt more comfortable around the guys and did feel like that group was a better fit, it wasn't exactly a perfect match either. And I didn't think that much of it. That was just how things were for me. And I love that about myself actually. I'm lucky to have grown up with this view. I don't even know how that happened, especially considering the area in which I was raised. I was naturally different, and maybe there were a lot of people who tried to change me, but my parents were never among them. I don't think they knew exactly what they were doing, but they were essentially raising a gender neutral child. I am reminded of a few times in my life when my parents encouraged me to pass just because it would make things a little easier (shorter lines for restrooms, 100 degree days at the ballpark, etc.). They saw nothing wrong with this, and they saw nothing wrong with how I dressed, cut my hair, or spoke. I never understood why it mattered that some clothes were placed under a sign that said "BOYS" and that some were placed under a sign that said "GIRLS". I always wanted to tell people that they were allowed to walk over to the other side and try them on. But they probably would have been afraid that they might like it. This is such a complicated issue, and I'd love to say more about it, but the whole thing has been haphazardly thrown together because I just couldn't stand holding it in any longer. It's funny. I'm about to go to a college party at the Drumline house. If you want a striking display of heteronormativity, go to a party thrown by straight kids. It's like a mating ritual.

Distracted

I'm supposed to be studying now, but I can't concentrate. I've been thinking about something for a few days, and it's been something I've thought about in the past. I really never thought I would have to think about a decision like this. It's hard for me to even mention it. If I did make the decision, I'd be absolutely annihilating any chance of joining the military. And I can't even begin to think about the reaction I'd get from my family. I've just had this ridiculous knot in my stomach for about three days. I have no idea what I should do. Part of me wants to do what I have always done and just forget about it for a while and to tell myself that I come pretty damn close anyway. I'm sure everyone knows what the hell I'm talking about by now, and maybe that's a little scary too. And maybe it's not something that I should do. How am I supposed to know? There's a part of me that wants to do, and there are parts of me that are terrified of what could happen to me (on many levels). But I guess if I weren't scared out of my mind, I'd really have something to worry about. And I don't even know because some days, I look in the mirror and I'm perfectly happy. But sometimes I'm not. Sometimes things just don't match up, but there are times when things feel perfectly aligned. And I worry about the same things that everyone does, I suppose. I wonder what my friends would do. I'm sitting in my office now, and it's taking a lot of energy to keep myself from breaking down and crying. I have a meeting with someone at 1, and I don't know if I'll be able to concentrate on what I have to do. I really wish I could take some time, but I doubt it'd be helpful. I'd probably just browse the internet and worry more. If I could start studying, that would take my mind off of things, but I really don't know if I should ignore this anymore. And maybe nothing will come of this, but it's still nice to know that you have everything in order--to be sure of it all. I keep wondering if this is what is supposed to happen to me. Has my life pointed to something like this all along? I guess if you look at any pictures of me, well, ever, you might think so, but until a few years ago, it was never something that crossed my mind either way. I've always just been myself, and it's never mattered one way or the other. Part of me thinks that there would be no reason to do it because I would still be me. But part of me thinks I might be a happier or more confident me. I'm really not sure, and I wish I had a clue of what to do. I can't even believe this is happening. And I have no idea what to do about the part of me that just enjoys being a little different and enjoys messing with perceptions. My head just feels so heavy. Maybe it just comes in cycles and I will forget about it. But the thought has more than crossed my mind more than once. I guess this is why they make you try it out first. Even that seems like it would be exceedingly complicated. God, I hate pronouns. When you think about it, that's really the only thing that would change if I were to try it. And maybe no matter what I am, I'm always going to be a queer. I'm going to wear the same clothes that I have. I'm going to do the same things I've always done. Too much is happening in my head right now. Web effect. I would love to talk to someone about this, but I would hate for that person to assume that I'm like everyone else who has thought about this before. I would hate to be labeled before I got a chance to say anything. Objectivity is the enemy here, which is rather unsettling for me. And ultimately, it's a decision that I have to make, but I don't believe that means I should make it alone. And part of me wants to say that if people could just stop paying attention to stuff like this, there would be no need for such changes. Fuck. Everything only ever happens all at once, it seems. It's 12:34. I'm making a wish.