Today is Trans Day of Visibility and I thought I’d share my TDOV poem from last year, because I had no place to put it then and I quite like it. To all my trans friends, lovers, and favorites: Be proud of who you are and what you had to do to get here. This world is better off with you all in it <3
My music recommendation for today is Friends. Lovers. Favorites. by the HIRS Collective
Easter Sunday
I seek the divine in all things even though I don’t believe.
I’m searching for something higher.
Something that brings me where I know this world is.
The sky is vast and open.
The world is screaming to be lived in.
And yet.
Barrel down the highway toward the place of your youth.
Stale water. These streets stay the same.
False life filled alleys
Stagnant backwaters of youth
Muck and algae greened your surface
I make the old rounds.
The apartment in whose basement I passed out drunk on the tiled floor.
Where I watched the thunder roll in from the south and felt the storm in my bones.
I drive down the road where I tried to kill myself when I was 18.
Passive death wish, hands off the wheel. Foot on the gas. Flooring it.
Today I grip that steering wheel white knuckled.
So much to live for. So much to live for.
I always get lost on the way to the graveyard.
Locals tell me, irritated by my appearance.
I’m not part of this place anymore.
Nothing to put on her grave today but my words.
I wish my grandmother could have met the woman her grandson became. I think she would be proud of me.
Her rough-hewn mineral headstone stands weathered and kind like the mountain from which it came. That’s one reason to believe in heaven.
The candle rejects my flame.
I try and try and try.
I am my mother’s daughter. She tends to her garden and talks to flowers.
I nearly cry because I do the same. It’s full of life. Mice, bees, birds, fish, spiders, lizards. Teeming. Bountiful.
And shared so readily, so widely, so easily. My mother is content and joins the sweeping bird song.
Pure coincidence that we have anything at all to do with each other, but you’re so different and so similar to me.
I am a 15-year-old boy, I’m a 25-year-old woman, I am a baby, I am the most mature person in this house.
Cold hallways and security locks hide remnants of a misplaced boyhood.
Easter and Trans Day of Visibility fall together this year. God can you see me? Can you see all of us? I died when I was 18 and yet here I am 7 years later. Am I your daughter too? My partner in crime says we’re all angels. I believe him. We’re all multitude, self created, close divine, catholic guilt can’t clip our wings.
I died and emerged into the light.
I’ve been told that it looks infinite. Like we emerged like we’d always been.
My siblings all died and then returned.
Messiahs each one. And disciples to each other.
Is that Blasphemy?
I will speak heresy until I make it gospel.