Checkmate

Who's ready to play?
Because God created this game
And I'm here to win
I've got the vision
I see the pieces lining up
I'm about to sink some ships

Idolatry

I'm not sure if I was almost ready to forgive you,
or if I had just begun to fall back in love
with a facsimile of you I could only meet at night.
But I woke up angry just like every other time.
I would still kill you if I had the chance.

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.