Bomb Shelter

I'll ask you if you think it's possible to love a bomb shelter

You'll ask me why

I'll say it's because that's what I pretend to be

When I feel like the world is closing in on me

My meditative happy space.

To meditate or medicate?

That is the question.

These hands are not my hands

These feet are not my feet

This heart is not my heart

They are the brick and mortar

I bought with my defense budget

This skin is not my skin

It is 7 inches of hard, cold obsidian

To fend off the inevitable irradiation 

of an erroneous environment

You'll laugh at me because you think I'm making a joke about my dick

I'll tell you not to interrupt my existential crisis

It's serious

It always will be

I'll tell you how some days

Every word said over me

And not to me

Whistles like the mouth of a warhead through the air

Reaching terminal velocity until the detonation of impersonal conversation

Explodes all around me

When other eyes register my perimeter and then quickly look away

I feel like the landscape is splintering around me

The bombs go off in my vicinity

Razed by apathy

Barely missing me

Intentionally

Disguising this test of endurance

As a test of luck

I'll tell you how some nights

I can sit in a room full of people

And feel as desolate

As the aftermath of a nuclear fallout

The ruins of my city

Populated by the inevitable irradiation

This erroneous environment reeks

The macabre miasma

accompanying 

the smell of spoiled vintage

And silver aura radiating

Around the halos of skulls long in the tooth

No longer aged and wise

Just decomposing

As our vitality pretends we won't

As our mortality portends we do

I try to ward off the vapor

With the salts and silver smelted in

The enamel of my too short teeth

But they stay rooted in their canals

Guards of show, not of action

Wanting for hands to cover my mouth with

Wanting for feet to walk away with

Wanting for a heart to pump life and color

To differentiate me from this silver haze

I have become a morbid monument

To edify this radiated ruin

Populated by you

Fluent in the language of light and reconstructive criticism

Clairvoyant future demystifying the fog

I stood in like the water

Hanging in the air of a silver mist

Draped around the sullen shoulders of Chernobyl

With all your nebulous swagger

And talks of diplomacy between mind and body

You stand at my barricade

You look me in the eye

Then down at the weeds encroaching on my perimeter

In your presence, the weeds whisper flowers

Forget-me-nots if you’re romantic

Roses if you’re not

You run your fingers gently along roughness of my rocky walls

Spread your warmth on the coldness of my obsidian facade

Press your lips against my door

Reminding me of my mouth

And with it, newly formed I ask you

Do you think you can love a bomb shelter?

You say yes

I've even made it my home.

Heteronormativity Is __________

Heteronormativity is me having to bite my tongue
When my straight white roommate calls some kid a faggot
Over Xbox like the experience of being a queer
Can be trivialized into your momentary frustration
With a game that you're not good at
In fact, that's kind of what heteronormativity is
Being forced to play a game that your not good at
In fact, a game designed for you to fail at
Where the endgame ends up being the ended lives
Of too many people I care about

Heteronormativity is that night three years ago
When I got a text from my best friend
Saying, I love you, but I don't want to live anymore
And the grief and gash of wondering if this
Is the night that he finally follows through
And the guilt and gash of knowing that he didn't
But secretly hoping that he had
Because sometimes it's easier
To let a down dog die
Then watch it get back up to get kicked back down again.

Heteronormativity is when I was 12 years old
And my grandmother told me she was going to kill me
Because she found gay porn on her computer
And that if I didn't straighten up
She would give me to God and let him have his way with me
And by this point even then hearing the word God
Was me being reminded of every verse
Being used to beat me like a Bible belt
And the cruel irony that the black church adopted the same tactics used by slave-owners
To justify the dehumanization of black slaves
The cruel irony of the once oppressed becoming the instrument of not only their own
Oppression, but the oppression of others

Heteronormativity meant learning early on that survival meant laying low
Till I was old enough to move out and carve a life of my own
And even then going off to higher education
To become surrounded by privately educated Georgia boys
Who for all their culturally rich upbringing in Georgia soil
Still have the audacity to say to me
I like you because you don't act like those other gays
You know the ones that make being gay the only part of their personality
And throw their sexuality into everyone's faces
You're a real bro, bro
Excuse me while I go rant about how many girls I've drunkenly had sex with
Because  I convinced them that I was deep and emotionally vulnerable
By giving them all the same mix-tape of sad, acoustic songs I listen to when I run out of
Budweiser.

I am tired of being silent
My silence won't save me or you
I am inviting you into a conversation
I do not care if you're uncomfortable
Your discomfort does not preclude you
From the responsibility of opening your eyes
And seeing
At the end of the day I will just be angry and sad
And hopeful and trying to be seen

Heteronormativity is you being able to walk away from this poem
 just feeling uncomfortable
While this poem is the only protection I have
in this fight for a chance at a fair fight.

Trigger Cut Your Hair to Cope

Past beliefs led me to believe that missing someone is loving someone in the past tense
But the advent of your absence is evidence to the contrary.
Don't apologize to me.
I will never feel sorry enough to absolve us both of our sins.
I won't apologize to you.
You will never feel sorry enough to absolve us both of our sins.
I grew my hair out the last time you left and told everyone I was just
trying to grow an afro.
Really I was growing my hair out so it would be long enough to grab and
jerk my scalp off.
They say pulling your hair is another form of masturbation.
When I pull my hair it pulls my head and I feel like I can finally
control my brain.
But I know I can't.
I take LSD instead.
I take acid to buffer the thoughts of you.
But I'm worn down to base thoughts
How I want to fuck you but will hate myself after it.
How I want you to fuck me but will hate you after it.
Violator.
Destroyer of worlds.
But really just mine.
Companion of cosmic concurrence.
Lock my carnal crush on you in the closet
you locked yourself in as the carnal crushes you.
The worst of us know how to place our monsters under other people's beds
The best of us know these monsters will play well with the demons
playing strip poker underneath our pillows.
When you die it will ripple through the universe to my cell phone.
Even though I'm sure when you die I will never know.
Mortality is the furthest distance.
When you die it will be first.
When you die it will be brief.
When you die.
Will I be alive?
I hope so.
I need some evidence that I can live without you.
Your birthday is this Saturday.
I think I"m going to get a haircut.

On Grief

The problem I have with grief
Is that even as a young child
I was aware that the world
Didn't always have my best interest in mind
Rarely had my best interest in mind.

As such I took easy to isolation
Not so alien
Not so strange
Voluntarily an island
An insular prominence
In this ocean of processed emotion.

A complex coping mechanism
I handled with care in younger days
Like a gilded chalice
Taken only in the sacristy's privacy
When I believed in such things.

My inward lens
For outward trauma
Indulgent and introspective
Yet.

In the shadow of death.
In the midst of a funeral.
My lonely, buried treasure
Revealed!
In the scope of grieving eyes
More vocal and expectant.

Suddenly recreational reticence
And internalized reflection
Forced into the open
By those believing that the act of grief
Is valid only as a public display of
human reaction.
A duty to the deceased
A duty to those suddenly aware
that they are living.

How strange it is
To mix
Business with pleasure.

Twist Nothing

the story of me
told through the story of the storm
deep rumble gurgle thunder
quick whip crack sodomy lighting
white hot turn pitch black
white yes black no
and the ties that bind
the way we think
primordial conditions
ingrained by the tempest
shock sparks life
charges galvanization
we are all Frankenstein
looking to tell the story
of ourselves
through the validation of another
mismatching our self with the
discarded parts of another body
necromantic romance idiot
decking tragedy with maxim and proven
proverb
This too shall pass
The pseudoscience of feel good
by being nothing
to twist zero into infinity
nothing lasts forever
and thus become one
with the meditative echo
"ohm"
"ohm"
"ohm"
oh. no.
break my concentration with the thought of you
breaking the thought of you in the concentration
of unproving proverbs
The old adage: hurt people hurt people
so I hurt things instead to
throw paramedics and well-meaning holistic
healers off the trail of my bio-betrayal
stream of consciousness induced
by pharmaceutical nihilism
new mantra
"I do not care"
"I do not care"
"I do not care"
and in not caring
no longer suffer
but perpetuate
the miscommunication of heartbeats
veins and arteries cross sections of sky
Like powerlines
Yet broken under the weight of feathersnow
accumulated -- we tried
We have always tried.
Galvanizing glimpse into the story
of my story
by the eye of the storm
Beyond nonsense
Plotting non-sensical cynical
twists of storylines
like cardiac arrests twist bloodlines
i have always been twisted into your nothing
a futile attempt at forcing infinity

Law and Order (Confessional)

Bring in the homosexual!

The lawmaker says

In a tone – antiseptic and clinical

Like he’s announcing the onset of cancer

Though with less sympathy

No – none at all.

You stand charged with the crime

Of perverting the natural order

And defiling the sanctity of marriage

Under the laws of God and man

You are allowed a final appeal

Speak now

Or forever

Hold

Your

Peace.

                Friends, Americans, Countrymen: Lend me your ears

                You call me criminal and pervert under the laws of the land

                I call myself a casualty of your policy

                I do not believe in original sin

                I believe that whatever shame seated within my soul

                Is engendered

                Not inherent

                An artifice of hateful, unintelligent design.

                You call me criminal

                But I look in the mirror

                And I see a man who has loved people as hard as they’ve hated themselves

                Realizing the heart is too risky a fuel to burn.

                You call me criminal

                But when I turn on the T.V.

                I feel like a refugee

                Running from violence like the blood and water

                That ran from the side of your Lord.

                You call me a criminal

                But I feel like a historian

                Retelling the stories of boys

                Locked in the skins of their fathers

                Possessed by the need for approval

                Often times – they claw themselves out
                 Fingers down to crooked bone

                Often times – they hang themselves
                Necks hanging like crooked fruit

                From the branches of their family trees

                Nooses tied by the sins of their fathers.

                What you call a sin

                That breeds only contempt

                Is what I call a bridge

                Closing the gaps of compassion

                Between me and every other victim

                Of the scapegoat slaughter you offer

                On the altar to your God of love

                You carry as an ark of comely hate

                Rebuilding the ivory tower

                With the ivory bones

                Of the tragically impressionable youth

                You claim to save.

                With the promise of being normal.

                You call me a criminal.

                I am not.

                You call me a monster.

                I am not.

                You call me an abomination.

                I am not.

                Do what you want, but do not throw God’s name in it.

                Your God be my witness.

                If I ever make it into Heaven.
                I'm gonna rattle your pearly gates.
                I'm gonna scream above the angel's song.

                I’m gonna tell him everything.

                I’m gonna confess it all.

               

The City

Sonic assault

and

Verbal abuse

When you stare into the city

It stares back at you

With eyes that glitter with burning lights 

Pushing the limits of their battery life

And the seamless way the metropolis beast

Belches Iranian and American leftovers through black asphalt teeth

So easy to be seen

So easy to disappear

So easy to see the disparity between

Couples intertwined by ambiguously powerful finger tapestries 

Zigzagging lifelines like bloodline tributaries 

Content with the presence of another

So easy to see the difference

Between them and the shadowed homeless living off of the music of sidewalks

devolving from the point

Of needing another human being 

To needing to fulfill a base need

Cause it's hard to love someone else when your hungry

The city that never sleeps is really the city that sleeps with one eye open

One ear to the ground to hear the conspiracy of rumbling subway factions

Intestinal train tracks pumping forth the contents of the urban lifestyle

The businessmen, the chefs, the students, the teachers, the whores, the pimps

The ironic hipster in his native subterranean habitat bitching about how inorganic 

Subway is

And in the distance the equalizers

The fallen towers

That remind us that shock and grief are the same no matter what language they're spoken in

Sonic abuse

Verbal assault

Abuse assault abuse assault 

Of names

Hitting you like a memorial wall 

The detached observation