Step 1: Get out of bed
Step 2: Look in the mirror
Step 3: Practice your smile
Step 4: Eyedrops to hide the red eyes
Step 5: Conceal the dark circles
Step 6: Breathe
The curtains are almost up
Step 7: Lock down the pain
Step 8: Ignore the weight on your chest
Step 9: Silence the screams inside of your mind
Step 10: Choke down the sobs
Step 11: Ignore the stinging in your eyes
Step 12: Swallow past the tightness in your throat
You’ve put on this show a million times
Step 13: Don’t let them see
Times up. Curtains up. Camera rolling

You know the relief you feel
once you finally come to consciousness
after spending a night
haunted by the most violent dreams?

The intake of oxygen upon waking
and the solace of realizing you're safe
That was what I felt
the moment I decided to leave you.

Now I can finally sleep
without having to wake up
to the pain I lived with
when I was with you.

Being with you was always a nightmare.

flatten your tongue
slip it between your teeth

n.

your little lips
forming an elipsis

o.

put them together
and may you declare
a word you’d so carefully deny—
no.

you spell it out
on table tops
shout it
from the rooftops

and when cursed hands
seek to defile your shrine
may you exclaim
"i am mine"

We live in a straight world.
You might not think it’s true,
“Gays are coming out everyday
could be them next or her,
maybe you too”
Well I’ll take a minute to prove it to you.

If I told you I’m into girls
I’d see your brain short circuit in real time,
“But you don’t look gay” you’d say.
“Straight passing” is what they call
a girl like me, who still looks feminine
but doesn’t want the D.

This “luxury” of remaining in the closet
is really hurting my game,
Added another straight boy
to my list of those who lost it
when they heard me exclaim,
“I appreciate the offer, but I’m gay”

Let’s not forget the most important issue
“Gays will ruin the sanctity of marriage”
Here, I’ll hand you the tissues.
Man and woman, hand in hand, till death do they part,
and yet more than half of all marriages
end in the perfected art of divorce.

Far be it from me,
to take anyone’s right
to do and say what they want,
while you embrace the hate
and live fighting the inevitable reality
of any queer couple tying the knot.

It might be 2018,
but I still can’t hold a potential partner’s hand
in a public facility
without getting disgusted leers
and a dreadful look at multiple cases
of unprovoked hostility.

So, try to look me in the eyes,
And tell me I’m not right.
But despite it all
I’ll keep my head up high
And let that rainbow flag fly
Because this might be a straight world,

But love is love

is love

is love.



And that concludes this winded verse.

Do not give me a
Structure to follow
When you tell me to
Be diverse and myself
In this rigid *******
World