The subtle cross between intersections, a life of blurriness, through crossed t’s and neatly dotted i’s I removed from the phrase Poetic Form, (trying to spell it without crossing myself back into it).
From lesbianism to manhood,
to cross what being a man means,
I wonder if my own identity is written in pen and everyone wants it typed and edited,
Yet I’ve taken the plastic keys off my computer board and made them into magnets last week,
Setting myself up with stolen magnets stolen blocks,
Putting them in order on my own fridge,
Scrambling them back because there is no order,
They only told you there was so that way you’d sing a song,
But I know now that I can write words, there’s no need for a pre-prescribed song when I’ve written my own,
In my own words.
When I look back and have pages of songs nobody else asked for or decided to write,
When I’m in class and I pocket my songs into stories and my stories under my low grades,
Under my teachers’ requests for MLA format,
I think of that caterpillar I played with in my room when I was six,
And how i thought about how people only wrote about butterflies
And how the caterpillars felt about that,
So when I asked my mother to ask her friend, an author,
If she’d write me into a novel,
Would she ignore me because I was a caterpillar,
Only choosing to open her mouth and write when my story became beautiful and socially acceptable,
When it grew out from the pubescent disliking of itself and stained the sinks of society,
Out of a hot pot of queer and quarantine,
Till the broth of the fluidity of my own being was was down the rabbit hole
Till all that was left was whitewashed spaghetti?
If these songs were anything I could write down again and again,
In pen, ignoring the requests to write neater,
To type faster,
If I put all my work into an envelope I already broke,
Shove it into a mailbox decorated with things people disagree with,
My pages bleeding ink few people can touch without being soaked,
When they ask me what to file me under
I don’t say “minority fiction” anymore
I say file me under “road signs”
At the intersections.
File me under that caterpillar,
In the wheat field,
Next to hydrangeas on the dinner table
A Sunflower in the spring
The harvested Brown Rice,
So when you make me into a meal I didn’t ask for,
I can be at least eaten by the vegans.