you showed me love
you taught me the beauty of forgiveness
you taught me to laugh
but your eyes don't smile at me anymore
they're enveloped in a suffocating fog
this emptiness weighs
I can't find words
That can cover the silence you left

Thirty-two is fourteen short of forty-six.
Thirty-two collects pools of hope,
and swims naked in them without fear.
It no longer wears a muzzle
but proudly wears a mask.
Thirty-two sees through a lens
of remarkable colors.
Its prismatic visions are
years ahead of its time.
Thirty-two tastes like tinny blood
on a tongue bitten for far too long;
it sings confidence
through chipped teeth—
freed from four years of clenched disgust.
Thirty-two does not have time
to stop and smell the roses,
but will demonstrate how
to make perfume from them, instead.
It has the words that
thirty-one never had
and keeps them in a pocket
that will accidentally go through the wash.
Thirty-two walks in the opposite direction,
but ends up on greener grass.
It orders a drink with a covered smile
and still generously tips the rude bartender.
Thirty-two prefers both
honey and vinegar to catch its flies,
and professes that knowledge
is a weapon best sharpened by modesty.
Thirty-two is an even number with
an odd beginning.
It suggests that what comes next
might have even more curves.
Thirty-two sets the stage for transformation,
but, more importantly,
drops the mic.

Even a broken heart can love again...just be patient and give it time.

My mother tells me to be quiet.
Their home-brewed bigotry spills
over every edge of the bar--
every chair laced with straight, white, borrowed souls.
It spills and evaporates into the air--
unfresh, close, and thicker than before.
It sprouts decayed, bone-thin fingers that wrap around my throat.
My eyes water at the existence of it.
I go to gasp, to sing, to fill my lungs with anything else,
but she hushes me.
The rest of them-- they laugh and they sip.
It's bitter, it must be so bitter, but still, they sip.
Disgust lingering behind their teeth,
they've accepted that "this is just how things are."
This is just the way things have always been.
Unchanged, uneducated, unfit for survival,
they simply wait for whatever comes next, and they sip.
But here I sit, frantic, searching.  
There is no way out. The clouds descend,
and I realize
I was raised until I raised myself.
My mother, she taught me kindness,
she taught me patience; how to take turns,
but she did not teach me how to breathe... in this.
I
taught me how to speak the oxygen of tolerance
in the presence of green, noxious bigotry.
I
chose to live beside the oppression of race, gender, and ****** preference.
I
do not blame these white, straight, borrowed souls
for fearing what they choose not to understand.
But mother,
I
will no longer
be quiet.

your voice whispers
a cry of light
splits the silence