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