Homophobia is not funny.
Care to hear what is?
The wrenching fear boring holes in your best friend’s once bright eyes
every Thursday afternoon, when she must enter a changing room filled with hostile glares
The violent purple bruise re-emerging beneath your brother’s left eye
the same bruise he told your mother about three weeks ago
that he’d “gotten in a rugby accident”
The gnawing feeling of loneliness in your classmate’s stomach as she lies in an otherwise empty bed
no longer able to hold her girlfriend’s hand in public
following a run-in with her mother at the supermarket
The boy next door who can’t bring himself to leave his bed
Immobilized with anxiety and wrapped up in the sheets
(it’s been six days, nine hours, and forty-two minutes since he told his best friend.)
The young woman who serves you your coffee on Saturdays
living on less than minimum wage for three years now
Since her mother left her to the streets
The kind boy you used to date, he’s been single for years
Caught and confused between miserable safety
and endless happiness
- - -
I lied before.
Not an ounce of wit lies within these words.
This is simply
an open letter to homophobes:
Find some ******* ******* originality for your jokes.
The poem says it all, really.