When I was a boy
I wasn't
I wasn't a little girl

I was a miniature adult
Who didn't quite understand
Why people said things they didn't mean
And it was to be nice

Why I knew that my friend’s mother had been molested by her father
When I was only eight

I was so afraid of the dark
No one talked me out of it
But I felt it was important to turn off the light
And so I did

There were no monsters
Just people
And they were hell
I learned to defend myself
So that I didn't have to fight

Except against my self

And I keep losing

But at least I can protect everyone else from me

My eyes open in the dim light
You are not there
Old engine oil in my ears
and red tape on the walls and the
Peephole

I am in every cheap hotel across the country
Anything could be outside of my door
I could be in a small town in Idaho
An inlet on the coastal northwestern shore
Minutes from the beach on the southeastern coast
The glorious place where the plains give way to mesas
I am all those places
the ones I've been and will go to someday
Scouting
Searching
Finding my way back to you
Before the diesel fills my mind
And my thoughts leave the rest of me behind
And so at the designated hour
My movement will be swift
My stillness will be complete
Non-doing
Ever prepared

Respect is something to be given and earned
But if you've got crosses and money to burn
Y'all ******* are gonna have to wait your turn
Because you've got something to learn

See, I stand with the spurned
Yellow, red, pink and brown
gonna use my privilege
And put my boots on the ground
Revolt, revolver,
fight to turn it around

See you can drone on
With your dog-whistle cries
I'll be teaching my children to see through those lies
You plant bodies
While we plants seeds
Herbicide, genocide resistant weeds
Gonna choke you out
For making us bleed

You keep turning our plowshares into swords
So we ain't gonna work on Sammie's farm no more
So my elders in the hoods in the back of the truck
Drunk on power can all go get ******

There's more of us than there are of you
And when we all wake up,
What you think you gonna do?
We're gonna just keep firing bullets of the mind
And your armies that are fam gonna leave you behind

Or make you think they're yours for true
When their mind is turned on
And it's turned on you
You're in deep **** now
With no canoe

So I ask again, what the hell you gonna do?

Words flow like rain in a gutter
Ceaseless
No concern for their path
No intent
Washing seeds away
No focus
Just exist to exist
Why should I care?
My love for humanity in general
Not wanting to be too specific
Hard for a drowning man to help one who is also drowning

I would take us both down

My apathy a kindness
My gruff rejection a concession to the
Material imperialists

And yet I still raise my face and voice in defiance

When I quit filling my mind
With the dreams of others
The wellspring began to pour from me
And I filled it with dreams of my own
For too long
I let it fill without
Pouring my dreams out
Because they were precious
And then the well went dry
No longer being necessary
But then I poured them out
And where they flowed
New things grew
And the spring flowed again

Cast adrift
And you an island
Cool fresh water
Fruit trees and heady nectars
But my home is the sea
And the rocking of the waves call me below deck
As the sun rises
Perhaps a dark cave
Somewhere upon your shores
Where I can be rocked to sleep
But I cannot sleep
In the sand

Such morbid fascination
Emotionally flaccid
I've cared so much for so long
While finances have made me prostrate
*******
Institutionalized
Intuition tells me
Sensational lies
And my axions accessed
Axons axiomatic
To touch
To feel
To love
brought to heel
And purposelessness
Accepted
A floating seed
Intercepted
Buried deep within the shallows
Excavated by the hallowed
And used for means unintended