the world does not owe me ease, only opportunity. and that opportunity can be toward harm or good, as i see fit. or don't see. or can't see. depending on my experience, capacity, clarity.

oh i have wanted the sunlit dreams of others. i have wanted simple stories, velvet nights, golden fingertips, the marks of people who have seen me or heard me in truth. but truth is not a debt that others can owe. love is not a gift that is owed. simplicity is not owed. these are earned, all. 

earned by individual action, to be sure, but also, by presence in communities who choose to hear and see as much as every individual must choose that as well. i have wanted to be seen. 

community chooses, like salmon pulling upstream, what is genetic: what is instinctual: what seems to be the greatest good for the most members. community chooses these things with blood, with time, with the long slow arc of mutuality. there is no individual outcome. there is no singular argument.

so to be set apart is to be set at a disadvantage: to be singular is to be separated from the possibility of communal peace, separated from the opportunity to build communal paths. if i know that i am singular, then i know too that i am alone. in much larger ways than simply today's pathways. 

there is such a difference between us: a million miles and all the paths i've already walked, a million tracts and all the books i've already written. you cannot see me. you cannot hear me in the ways i want to be heard. 

i write poetry about psychiatric intake. it earns laugh reacts on facebook. 

i write poetry about a broken body, the machinations of physicality. it earns shrugs from those who came before, and a round of beers from those who are stuck here with me. 

the perpetual struggle: is it me? or them?

and if them, what can that possibly mean about me other than that i am different, other, elsewhere, somehow set apart? whether it is mercedes declaring me an indigo soul or leslie declaring my chakras broken, it will not matter, the outcomes are the same. only me, standing on this cliff, alone and groping for anyone else's skeleton. only me, standing in this tornado, ripping community to shreds to get to the facts of your body. 

i miss you desperately. i have forgotten and remembered you ten thousand times. make it a million more. 

you could be here with me: you could be in this house, you could be sharing these meals, you could be skin to skin with me and holding onto a hope we sprouted together. you could be here with me. you could have loved me. 

on the ways when i forget how much more weight physicality holds, the days where i press knife to skin to remember that psychological, emotional pain simply is not enough. if i cannot prove it in my body, it must not exist.

this too will be rejected. and i remain unafraid of my faith. i will come to you, time and time again, hoping to see love light up your eyes, hoping to see recognition.