They’ll make you feel like the bottom of a shoe.
Like you’re just meant to be walked on until you wear through.
But the only thing you have in common with a shoe is that you know what the ground feels like because their weight pushes you toward it every day.
And they may tell you that you’re all hormones and ***** moans.
But that’s just not true.

First, it was the stars on my ceiling
Glow-in-the-dark stars
That I stuck up there with double-sided, sticky foam
I stared at them every night,
Thinking These are the real deal
I traced them with my index finger,
Squinching up one eye so that I could play
Connect-the-Dots: Cosmic Edition

Then it was the stars on my walls,
Boy bands and Orlando Bloom
The epitome of hot, I thought
My friends and I would trade each other
Picking and choosing our favorites
The very best were the ones where you couldn’t decide
Which side to display of
My Galaxy Love

Then there were the stars in my eyes,
The ones everyone told me about
The only stars that were ever real
I used to look for them in the mirror
Leaning forward
But maybe they just meant that my splotchy
Gold-brown irises looked like the cosmos my
Eye Color: Starry

Now I see the stars in the heavens,
White, shiny stars,
Like pin-pricked holes in the sky,
Patterns that people tell me are there
That I pretend to see
These are the real stars, I think,
But after all this time maybe there are no stars
Maybe stars are just a dream

If being gay is a disease,
Then I'm so sick
That I'm coughing up rainbow phlegm

The first item of the gay agenda is call the meeting to order
We count for quorum and make sure the entire rainbow is present,
My mom taught me meeting manners
At our conference room, dinner table.

They told a Ginsberg to write like a Kerouac
And they told a millennial to act like a baby-boomer
But the difference between Ginsberg and me is that he could’ve had the Dream
But when they wrote it down, they left out the gays
And the the LGBT’s left out me.

They saw the way that the gays were eyeing monogamy
Like it was a sequin halter top once worn by Bowie
So, white, straight, cis America wrote to the government,
And now it’s The American Dream, Patent Pending.

He taught me to be afraid.
Not horror-movie afraid.
Not power-out afraid.
Those kinds of afraid propel you down dark hallways with the shadows nipping at your heels.
And he made me the kind of afraid that pushed my head down so I couldn’t meet his eyes.
The kind of afraid that made me absolutely still-- frozen-- like an ice-queen.

I don’t think he knows that I’m afraid.
He just watches me like he’s puzzled.
Like I wanted it.
And he can’t understand why I want to take it back now.
But it’s a Christmas present without a receipt, and the department store won’t let me return it.

He taught me to be afraid of myself.
Afraid of my voice.
I should have said no,
Yelled no,
Screamed no,
Whispered no,
But it would have shattered the quiet darkness.
And I’m afraid of the broken glass.
I was afraid of all that I am, and all that I was.
Afraid of my skin and my lips and my bones.

And he doesn’t know how afraid I am.

And it's graduation,
I'm thinking "now or never",
And you look at me
Like this is it,
And you clasp my hand
Like when we were kids,
And my ******* are hard
From the nighttime chill,
And our pasty skin is fluorescent,

We count backward from ten,
And at one we leap off the dock,
Into the icy river,
And I can hear your feet
Propelling you to the thick black surface,
But I stay under
Feeling the water
And the little bits of sand
Floating up around me,

And when I'm ready,
I plant my feet on the ground,
And kick off,
My head finally bobbing under the stars,
And you're already laughing
Like your mind is as far from me as your future,
But I'm ready now,
Because all I can do is move on
and laugh with you