His lungs seemed chilly inside his burning chest,
and he coughed up the steam and smoke,
but up and about him the oak
forest did not stir, did not bend and creak to hold a leafy hold around the guest.

His eyes felt frozen open inside his flushed, fevered face,
and he couldn't tell where his body ended and the cold world began.
The pace
of his heart rose and fell again.

i wish i wasn't aware of myself most of the time
cause what good comes from all this hating and hurting
and struggling to mime
who i wish i was but who i'll never be

i can keep on pulling a dark jacket over my head
and walking in two lines
but no matter what i always end up here in bed
not sleeping, not crying, not dreaming
just listening to my own rehearsed lines

and in the morning when i wake up
i'll feel fine until it's time to get dressed again
and i'll see the veins in my arms and remember them opening
and i'll see that the hair over them is fine and white,
because no matter how hard i try
i'll never be who i think i am

i might dream when i fall asleep
about that man who i could have been
but i'll wake up again
wishing i hadn't
and thinking about how i can stop the sunrise from shining in from outside
without making it sink below the horizon every day

Can you feel the power coursing through you,
disguised as adrenaline,
when you swing your arm and before the blow even hits,
you feel all your anger and frustration fade, so now all you want is to fight?
You wanna kick and pitch a fit,
till your old ****** arms
are covered up by new scars,
but nothing like that matters because you're the last man standing.
Maybe the other boy, curled up on the ground now
with his arms thrown over his head,
broke your nose and made it even more crooked than before,
but you're the little freak who no one thought could win.
But you entered in
from a world where everyone called you ****
to be the freak who everyone only saw as a ****,
thin-shouldered and quieter than the boys he fought.

Maybe your quietness and meek, weak, malnourished look fooled you and all of them,
for look into your eyes in the mirror and see the gold and brown fighting through the green sheen,
the fire for everything you hate, all the things you're hitting and spitting on when you're through with them,
and when you stare into your own eyes you might recognize yourself.

Don't be fooled, boy, you're weak and you're sick,
your arms aren't thick
which muscle and dark hair,
and nothing about you is real,
with fabricated reactions and premeditated sentences,
all programmed into your brain, which fights itself in its confusion,
screaming, and smoking from the fight with itself, about what should be happening with your emptiness and with your bony chest.

Boy, you're hardly that,
just a *** who stares after the other guys,
but you're not sure if you're gay, because you really just want to be just like them.
Boy, at least you fall for pretty girls,
shorter and daintier than you, with more mellow hearts but stronger emotions,
and passions for poetry (not the kind you possess, rooted in your inability for expressions)
and always with love for another boy, a real boy to grow into a man.

I remember my dreams of a holy place,
a library where I ran, just a little boy with other boys,
with a great stained glass window filling up the space
on the pointed ceiling above the sacred text
that left me perplexed
and mouthing a few syllables when I could understand,
and wishing to feel the soft cloth on my head,
over a short haircut that I didn't have.

I can't truly say if it was a dream,
but I remember walking outside into the desert with those little boys, feeling jealous of their kippahs,
and eventually we stopped at what I thought might be like a stream,
but was only a canal in the wasteland.
The tumbleweeds whispered and rattled,
but no snakes slid out of them with a tail that rattled quite the same.

I grew up though, far away now,
with the heavy weight of knowledge on my back
and the feeling of sweat on my brow.
I have heard a lot, and that soundless world where I spent all of my time looking and none of my time listening
is gone. I listen and I look now,
and I tell a girl about my observations
while she marvels and tells me what to do with them,
but there is nothing much to become
when despite my ambition
I hold myself back with the most unholy things.

There are no words for the songs plucked out on the heartstrings
of the melancholy man with deeply sad eyes,
but he sings those songs to the stormy skies
through the tears rolling down his craggy cheeks into the world's oceans,
and those same tears slipping off of the barely beating wings of the tired wrens.

He thinks himself a strange man,
with not a single instrument to his name,
yet known as a musician,
and he breaths out in cold clouds his sorrow,
but the sparrows,
those little birds, let his breaths of freezing billow
roll off of them as easily as the starlight that the sad man can't see.

What a man, so heavyhearted,
who does not know how to play his own heartstrings like a harp,
how to play his heart like a drum,
how to play his brittle ribs like piano keys,
so heavyhearted that he cannot bear to give anything else the weight to exist,
so heavyhearted that the rest of him blows away and he is but a heart,
old and cheerless, without its own reason to exist.

Your name rests on my tongue,
and I know you are my brother,
but deep in my chest where I know there should be an ache,
I can't feel much of anything.
Our friend misses you
when I can't properly manage to.

People keep talking about how things are better without you,
and it makes me angry
especially when I think about the act she put on when she woke up that morning.

I picked up that little red book,
and I put it back ten minutes later with shaking hands.

I dug my nails into my palms,
and I seethed with the knowledge I ignored.

I think about everything I lied about for you,
all the secrets I kept without you even knowing,
and all the things I endured,
because I love you
even though you left.

Yeah, you left at your first real chance,
and you didn't think about who you were leaving,
you just told me to lie for you,
and I did it.
I turned around and lied to everyone,
and now I have to pretend it's all fine.

Some kid I don't even know is my hero
because he called me "he" when he doesn't even know me
and everyone else scares me
because they're constantly mocking all us ******* trannies,
saying we shouldn't exist,
because we're liars and delusional.

I can't stand people who says they're like me
just because they don't conform,
because they're not.
Not conforming isn't the same
as letting everyone see you and call you "it" and "******" and saying they hate people like you,
and not being able to breathe because you've got too beaten up by yourself hiding something
and wanting to die but only not doing it because you can't stand for a single person to talk about it with "she" on their minds.

I used to say I hated dresses and pink and all that girly **** when I was young not because I always did but because I couldn't stand anyone calling me the girly girl,
and then I always played sports, I fought and wrestled and kicked off my shoes for soccer to show the guys I was tough,
I was one of them,
and when they said I was just like them
I skipped and cried at home from happiness.

I don't believe in any god, or heaven or hell,
but I pray with all my heart
that I could have been born as someone else.
Even though I hate to feel jealous, I usually do not,
I wish so desperately that I could be any number of guys I see.