Spent

How can you ask me to spend my life here
Always asking for permission
For space, for rights, for my vitality

Contrition

I have so many things to say
All the shame I've been entrusted fills my mouth instead
And I am smothered when I try to deliver
This depravation is mutilation
And I am still languishing alone

Counterfeit

You can sustain the body
But when the soul flickers
When the soul is homesick for its nest
Away from this sensory coil
Our only consistency here is change and decay
I don't know where to find restoration
When I can't find rest, least of all in sleep where
My past will always find me
The fog and shadows played tricks
And outwitted my better judgment
Somehow I'm left with the counterfeit

Forgetful

I can't stop remembering the time
you told me you wished I could remember
to tell you the things that I forget.

Pioneers

I feel like a tiny spider in an egg sac
And my only objective is to put as much distance
Between me and my cohorts as soon as I am free
To jump, legs splayed and web trailing,
And hope I catch the breeze that will deliver me
And the only place I can imagine finding hope anymore
Is on some cold, rocky planet far, far away from home,
From all that's familiar, from everything I know
To place all my faith in my own biology and sheer chance
To hope that some of us, wherever we may scatter,
Might continue to weave our webs.

A House

I am a house with blue walls and red bulbs
Superannuated, abandoned and in disrepair
Just cinders in a cold hearth
Swallowed by a forest
Seeds nestled in moist pages
Verdant moss recovering life from decay
So much life here but none of it is mine anymore
And I slip quietly beneath the stilts to wander
Through the trees without these dilapidated beams

Charged

You left me to figure out it all 

I was just a kid and I didn't know how to make sense of my body betraying me 

And everyone insisting my sex came with expectations

And that my gender came with consequences

Close your legs. Pull up your shirt. You're going out in that?

You made me feel like my body

Was a crime and I was guilty

So I felt ashamed.

Consent

My first word was No
And ever since they have been
Trying to undo

Dybbuk

Seems like my grief and insecurities
Like to rest in the shadows
And creep out at night like hungry ghosts
I've been feeding them so long
Scraps of me like the sadness when
He chipped me into pieces to feed his own
Or sometimes big chunks of festering anger
For repeated abuses from someone
Who's've gone hungry too long
There are weeks here and there
When mine go hungry too
But then they feed on the ampleness in me
And I am diminished and they, replenished
And I am a hungry ghost too.

Home

She's just a difficult person to be involved with
You open up to her
And she tears the place apart
Hacking at any boundary that stands in her way
She doesn't know what she's looking for
But she'll know it when she finds it
And I'm afraid there'll be nothing left if she ever does

Empty

I woke up that morning
And rolled over onto you
And I remember feeling
Absolutely nothing for you
When three years before
I felt too much and
Could only beg to feel less

Alchemy

It's difficult to say
whether I'm dissolving or here to stay
Assessing my own deliquescence
Before a second pubescence
Seems to me more than a little verbose
With this body still so pilose
But I find it impossible to resist
This dichotomy seems always to persist

And I am left here soliciting
Someone without an alchemical conditioning
For permission to transform from dissolute 

To precipitate, and understand I am most resolute,

In this quest I am destined for success

I will transform, my body I will repossess

Foreigner In A Foreign Land

There's something inside me that's older than I am
And when I feel depressed I feel it stir
It compels me to leave
It urges me to return
And so I lie in the dust
On the floor beneath an altar
Decorated with ribbons
Celebrating traumas survived
And lay cold silver coins on my eyes
Straightening the chain holding my mogen david
Pulling the altar cloth across to repel the chill
And I feel myself sink into the dust
My body biding time before an inevitable decay
And it sinks through the floorboards to meet the earth
Stirring restlessly in the interval
Between ashes and ashes
And it's enveloped by dark musty arms
Returning my body to its home
To which I will soon enough return
I'll be home when they tuck me in,
Softly and gently, pulling the dirt up to my chin
When I am again what I have always been
And I am indistinguishable
I am earth again

Transitions: Two Hands

i reek of desperation
that's my prayer
a quiet whisper between two lips
through my skin and two hands pressed
for a life of peace without fear
without pain and without shame
to transition discretely
without unnecessary trauma
i'm so angry all the time now
and i haven't even started
so i ask dear goddex up there
to please help your lost lion
take the thorns from my paws
and lead me home to my pride
because i'm losing it down here
and i want to come home
send me soothing comfort
and your infinite patience
because im drowning in the way i feel

Transitions: Goodbye

I left some part of me
When I stepped off the platform
And disappeared into a subway car
To disembark at some unknown station
And she feels lost to me now
But I don't think I'd want her back
Her long green hair fluttering
And two hissing doors closing
That was the last I saw of her
The last bit of her to see.
Now it's just me.

Miss Me?

You missed me
Or maybe you missed her
And I was the ersatz replacement
Or maybe you missed something
You'd never even had before
And we were the vessels of your journey
Maybe you missed yourself
The person you closeted away inside
And we were false idols to be worshiped
In order to distract you from You