She wipes my taste from her lips and says “you can’t be queer at work.
It’s not professional.“

She doesn’t think that it is okay to wear your whole self to work if it is not straight passing
talking about straightness is reasonable
But bring your gayness to work day never comes

It is a storm that I hear every season, but this time I am caught out in it without shelter, hail pelted on soft petals barely open.

She doesn’t look queer
she is a woman
she looks like Helen who was loved by all,
tan and toned
from looking out over the ocean and lifting her beauty up on slight shoulders

If it was unprofessional to be straight
or to use pronouns at all,
I would understand.
If we only used each other’s names
and I was asking for more
or special dispensation
I would understand

she says she doesn’t understand
why I need to announce on glittered skin and lips that I so proud of who I am
Why I need to brag with rainbow eyes and clothes
My Blooming to her is rising higher than I deserve

But I am not Icarus with waxy wings plummeting plumes and
mans mistake of highest hubris  
I am asking for you to see me as I am
Not what you have assumed that I was

When I painted her with rainbows and kissed her in the dark
she saw every inch of me
intimacy that only the moonlight knows
She accepted me then, fleeting as that night was

Then she scrubbed my kiss away before anyone that mattered could see
Stripped off my borrowed rainbows
Dressed  in unassuming pastels
Seated comfortable in a chevrolet status quo
she drove home to her Barbie dream house
Kissed her fiancé Ken
He tightened his arm around her the next time I saw them, pulling rank
I am only for the moonlight

Demeter welcomes her with open arms
In this world they have never parted.
She is Persephone who did not eat the seeds and queerness is Hades, she only vacations here

I plunged my teeth into that’ fruit before I knew what queer was, I ****** down enough seeds to keep me Cerberus
Walking among the rest of the world wanting to belong, but standing out like I have three heads.

You are delight
I want you to remember this moment
if I ever lose the touch of your fingertips
exchanging so many times I love you
I will protect the feeling as we press our hearts together,
beings made not of binary but of ether
Drinking nectar of blooming stars
Spinning our laughs into the night

You are safety
We bandaged each other's wounds when attacked
Living in bodies like ours is dangerous, is war
We trade our battle stories and scars
Taking our presence back from woolen pockets,
unraveling our rage and winding into skeins
Knitting row by row a full soft community,
Inviting us to rest

You are life
You make me feel planted,
stretched toward the next time we will speak
as a sunflower turns, face kissed by the sun
You are a gift that cannot be held, given, owned
too much in the way that confounds men
but always just right
told that you should, you should, you should
shredding them and lining your nest
working, you sing

You are the moon
I set my time by our visits, our calls, our messages
like you in all the universe are brave
breaking the atmosphere of the earth
to join in the celestial dance
you humbly, kindly exist in harmony
you are comfortable in stillness
yet your beauty attracts any light and makes it yours
dancing as you glow

You are thoughtful
Absorbing knowledge like paper drinking ink
You write like the world is transparent to you
glass for you to see more clearly
you hold my gaze like a seer
yet you bend to earth to work
dirt on your hands
You are not glass
Remember that you are this powerful
Remember that you should be seen
Your stories are legends

He held hands and when he ripped away
Felt it unfair that he only
came away with his half
Complained when both my eyes
Were a mirror too small
to see his whole self inside
Shoving his fingers in the cracks
of my tear ducts trying to open my gaze
see more of himself
Complaining that my tears were wet
My pain was hard to hear
Disappointed that this was the affect
That I was not blessed
That I did not thank him for his time
That my song was not his side of the story

people ask me if my brain has started rewriting itself
If my consciousness expanded to take up the space left behind in these two months of rapid decline
Maybe in the week my eye has refused to read street signs and text messages

I am asked If I start hearing people’s locations as my sight slips further out of my reach
as if this is a neotech drama about self awareness and I am Neo
I just need to wake up, take a pill and I will harness the Matrix

more aware of my lost ness of my smallness
Of how I am I insignificant and absorbed into the collective strangeness of a crowd

It is not a different kind of light or of seeing but a falling darkness and sensing things in the night, when bats are flying low and recklessly close. When I feel the current swell around me as the unknown let’s me escape in previously grandfathered ignorance.

Tonight I am not ignorant. I am looking at a blank and dismal map. It is not filled in in the slightest.
I am rust and berry pulsing within a thick cracked skin in a sea of unbeing, only aware of where I touch the raw, colorless, and endless universe
Intensely attenuated to my body curled in fetal position
against the thickest nothing I have ever encountered.

like a slumbering geode
Filled with colorful secrets
Poised to bloom
I wait
But rocks sleep forever