I carried you on my back
Like a sack of potatoes.
Back and forth and back and forth
Caught between Daddy Issues and
Words that call forth memories
That call forth pain that call forth
Vomiting Monday nights before therapy.

All of our VHS boxes are packed up neatly
In the attic between old photo albums of
Broken family after broken family after
Generations who don’t know each other’s
Stories. We’re ****** up.
That’s all we’ve ever been as a family.

And she sings jellyfish clouds
While he rhymes puppydog tears
Somewhere between the nature of agender,
One gender, two gender, red gender, blue gender.
They’re the first kid in generations to write.
They’re the first kid in generations to escape.
They’re the first kid in generations with mirtazapine dreams.

And no one lets them forget it.

Here is my Essence:
God in his malice
Created a snowball,
The size of the New World,
Set it on the crown of the Cosmos,
Let it Roll,
Until Us in our innocence,
Crinkled the waste between our spangled digits.

don’t tell flowers

you love them.

wilting daffodils will cry,

sunbaked tulips turn their gaze,

and beneath the pinkened sky chrysanthemums

hide shame in yellowing beds of weeds.

in the new age your bursting fingers fiddle helplessly with a broken plug.

you’re all swollen tongue and swollen heart and swollen organs in a big bag of bones.

no one has loved you since, and repeatedly in three years of foreign language,

we remind ourselves of our broken mind, broken body, broken roots,

an oak tree that has been standing for too many years and is rotting at its core,

all its rings eaten up by termites.

loathe love, hold onto your bitterness, you’re starbucks hot chocolate.

in the Elbow of Acceptance
the Crux of Anxiety
they bore me like a rat child,
tail and all,
Squirming in the emptiness that is
Where?

in the Gashes of Deceit
and the Gouged out eyes of Dimness
i was raised, a satyr,
a nymph,
Shrieking in the vast expanse of
Who?

it is a question
Never Answered.

We had ***, to the Bell Spelunking
Of Andy Bird, Saturday night,
And when I stuck your ****
Into aghast chasms you said
There was nothing. Tingles
Pinpricks on your spine.
You cannot feel me.

Outside your glass eyes beneath
Dark cool lenses, and I am but
A freshly born babe, clutching
My sexuality in greedy paws,
Bashing the shell upon my chest.
I bit your ****. You cannot feel me.
It bled. You cannot feel me.
I am distraught over years of wasted dental work
And twenty cavities.

You only feel me when I am ***** deep
Brushing the holy grail of slash fanfiction
And in reality it's a messier, uglier
Business, and I don't know, I am a newborn,
I am a newborn, I was just born today
As a sinful lump of flesh, as
A lump on the log of love,
And we can never be married and
You cannot feel me.

If you’re gonna
Die in the apocalypse
Drop out of school
Dump yourself into that little
Ditch you made that was stemmed from
Decades of anxiety and
Depression
You might as well look good doing it.
If your mascara runs in the eternal
Race to your dripping baby chin
It might as well be mixed with the glitziest
Eyeshadow you can afford
(Mine is hand-me-down from my mom,
Who has been called a drag queen too many times
For her to count but somehow
That makes me, her little genderless clown,
Feel connected in some cosmic way
To her ****** again).
Save your pennies so you can
Splurge at the thrift store on
Sweaters that go down to your knees to hide
Vaginas and ****, bits
That maybe you wanna be coy about today,
So all the people spitting in your eye can at least
Trip on your pronouns and your triumphant
*******
Can scrape the heavens.
You’re allowed to buy that tie, I mean
Easing the pain in your wrists and your heart and your stomach
Is done best in floral print,
In pop culture t-shirts,
In femme/butch/femme/hard/soft
**** culture, *** tantrums,
If you’re gonna get called by the wrong ******* name all day
At least look your best when you resist the urge
To send fists sailing into their face.
And it’s not just us but anyone,
If you’re ******* angry that someone keeps commenting on the size of your
Thighs the lush of your
Lips and some ******* keeps
Trailing you on his bike
Shake your studded gloved fist at him and tell him
THIS IS NOT FOR YOU, LORD OF THE *****,
LORD OF THE NORM, I PICKED THESE
FIVE DOLLAR SHOES FROM THE RACK OF GOOD WILL,
SHONE THEM UP LIKE I SHINE MYSELF
FOR MYSELF
WITH MYSELF
I AM MYSELF.

The world ends with a mouth full of cotton,
A misaligned bloodstream.
2:21 AM. The world ends with
Your lips, far away from mine
And mediocre poetry
Dotting the inside of
My eyelids.