27, 28

i’m not a boy as much as a bouquet. still a boy though, just about. round it up like numbers ending with 5. my dad makes me dinner and i talk to him about gender, about the edges and the corners of it. he leaves me with empathy that feels like a jacket: warm. i’m not a girl as much as i am a horizon. i listen to the same song on repeat because each time feels like the first time. i think of my best friends and i smile. in the cab on the way home i look out of the window, into the distance. i see my future clearly, for the first time in years. i wave at him. he waves back.

IMAGINARY GIRLFRIEND HOURS

watch a new tv show together kind of intimacy. fall asleep with my head on her shoulder kind of intimacy. laugh too loudly together, share ice-cream from the carton, sing along to the radio and dance badly in the kitchen. pulling silly faces when she’s on the phone with her parents just to make her laugh. the kind of intimacy that’s gentle. warm. sharing makeup kind of intimacy. i’m leaving the house and i grab the nearest coat, and it’s hers. that kind of intimacy. i can talk about my hyperfixations to her and she’ll listen. and she can talk to me about hers, and i’ll listen, too. even when we can’t relate. we brave the unknown for each other. she makes me hot cocoa. some nights when i can’t sleep, i still share the bed with her kind of intimacy. cradle her in my arms kind of intimacy. if i sleep, wake up curled around her kind of intimacy. it’s easy, being a woman in love, i’d imagine. it’s all the little things. all the times we hold hands. reach out for each other. buy groceries together. play video games together. and she’ll wing my eyeliner, if i ask her to. and she’ll kiss my cheek if i ask her to. and she’ll tell me about her favourite movie if i ask her to. and we won’t need to say that we love each other with words. that’s our intimacy, that’s our secret. we’ll show each other. again and again and again and again. every morning. every afternoon. every night.

—- ♡ —– ♡ —- ♡ ——♡ —–

transgender modes of grief transmission.

in first semester i wear my zeal
on the edge of my teeth but now
i let the voice of reason carry me
over treetops and ledges and right into the streams.
somewhere else there’s a man and he looks like me
except he didn’t need to fight the world the way i did
somewhere else there’s a man with my face and
he was born to be me but he isn’t me
he was born to be glorious but he’s a bastard
or something like that, and this wasn’t
supposed to be a poem about privilege
but almost all poems are ultimately about privilege
or about existing, which in itself is a privilege
by which i mean, literacy
privilege, accessible literature
privilege, eloquence
privilege, self-actualization
fucking coincidence but you can slot that under
privilege if you want
university
privilege
still being alive on transgender day of remembrance
privilege
or maybe privilege isn’t the right word
not when we’re all persecuted
you could probably pin it all down
on sheer luck
i am not a man in a woman’s body, i am a man’s body
in a sheath of nonbinary and i curve everywhere
a woman should but i am not a woman
because i perceive myself
the way i want to be perceived
which means, skin and bone
and isn’t every single poem just a tribute to
being around to create poems
being hurt or being happy or being in love
which essentially means you are hurt and you are happy
we are all does on the sidewalk looking at the arrows
and saying to the hunters, hey
keep the taxes quiet for a minute,
listen, are you sure you want to kill me?
somewhere outside, a man wears a body
designed for me that somehow
got lost in factory management
but it’s fine because
i love my transgender body.
in first semester i think i am cis
but i am aware of gender in the way that birds are
aware of the sky and salmon are
aware of the stream
which is almost the opposite of
privilege
it’s living on the very edge
of the fangs of existence
and i’ve always bitten down
with all my front teeth
making it to sixth semester is a
privilege. in a few months if all goes well i will
graduate and if i’m lucky enough i might
get into my dream university and that might be
privilege again or maybe just a coin toss in my favour because
if i don’t make it out of here i will be just another
statistic, just another person grieving and
swallowed by grief
swallowed by violence
swallowed by hate
transgender and brown and all the way down
from the south asian south
i only wanted to write a poem about pain
about how when one of us dies
all of us
feel it within ourselves
ripples
in the pond of the transgender collective
bullets
in an area of common assembly
blood that belongs
to everybody in the vicinity
it’s not empathy as much as
a personal wound
that hurts each and every one of us
because none of us are safe until
all of us are safe and
we are all afraid of
becoming statistics
while the most privileged groups make tables and
print out charts the most privileged groups
do nothing and watch.
the most privileged groups
could never feel collective love
the way we do
or collective sadness
collective pain
collective grief
which is why i think that poetry is a little like
the song, “the winner takes it all” by ABBA
except that the game is rigged each round
and some of us lose no matter what the stakes are
gambling our energy each time we demand respect
all the batteries in our bodies
always running dry
always running empty
always running.
somewhere out there, a cisgender man
is wearing a body
that should’ve been delivered
to me

he can keep it.

 

 

The Trans Feels Good Omens poem I wrote in August (and didn’t post anywhere)

all the queer kids are talking about
snake eyes soft yellow buttercup slits dilated like
window blinds narrow and ok let’s discuss
face tattoos, David Tennant carrying demon body
with fond memory of snake, moving
with fluid flexibility – i wish
my hair were red enough that i’d turn heads
wish for being able to walk like Crowley

or even to be the other side of this entire thing
groups of people talking about Michael Sheen’s
twitter account & soft positivity, everyone
being kind to each other in the light of it,
something about supportiveness, wanting to
extend that sort of hand to people around them –
which is to say that you can make the world a better place
just by being kind & meaning it

bodyswap scenes made me feel at home,
trans kids know it, we live in these bodies and
walk through long highways of shadows and look
in the eyes of people who spite with misplaced belief
and we will not look away – we will wear our bodies
the way we want to, play the game by our own rules
or something along those lines, something along the lines of
things are not what they seem, reinvent yourself,
change how you’re perceived, yell at a plant,
OK, and we’re all good

or are we? there’s so much unsaid, like how
the aftermath of surviving trauma is often just
trauma on repeat, that you feel the things you suppressed,
suppressed to survive like “eyes on the road” and
“stay alive” and were there moments when
close scrapes with death even in memories
breathed down celestial necks, or tender glances said,
i can’t believe he’s survived or
after all this time, all this time –


i wouldn’t put a number to it.
words probably won’t do, either.

maybe there’s venom instead of blood in my body (but hey, i’m still alive, and that’s all that matters.)

 

Here’s some art journal stuff that I put together in light of someone who called themselves my “best friend” acting as if I was irrational over being upset about being hurt and asking for help. All images are royalty free, and all words are mine – except for the album art (Broken Bells) & Marina’s album The Family Jewels + the lyrics from certain songs, which are in the yellow font.

I’m just, honestly, tired of people who call themselves my friends but don’t respect me, don’t respect my boundaries, whatever.

She sort of implied I was heartless or something for cutting a friend out of my life after being friends for three years, but truth is simple – I’ve been through abusive & toxic relationships before. I need to look out for myself. Three years of best friendship barely compare to the 8-ish years of codependency featuring me and the girl I was in love with, who (likely unintentionally, but she did this all the same) was perpetually putting me down, invalidating my struggles, questioning my worth, etc etc. None of that compares to having faced abuse at the hands of your biological parent. So. I’m not really sentimental when I’m being disrespected.

It says a lot about my self-worth and growth, I guess, that I’m in a stage of life now where I just. don’t have time for people who don’t value me. I’d much rather have no friends than have tons of fake friends.

This was surprisingly fun to do, and i might just….. do more of the same in the future.

we’ve got band-aids for our wounds here.
we’ve got a softer tight grip. we know how to survive when we are hated
and we know how to live. you only know how to take
and not to give. your hands are poison, but only you will drown in the river.

respect must be earned, it’s not default
when most of the world would like to see people like us
dead. so yeah, i’m not going to trust you, you need to prove it first.

and i’m not here to watch the fruit flies in your mouth
or smell the vinegar on your breath.

an extract from my poem “like talking to a wall.” which you can read in full here  [ mature content warning because i use the f-slur at one point, in the context of people saying it when they aren’t entitled to. if the use of that word triggers you please be careful / you don’t have to read the whole poem ] 

guess who did finally did it? here’s a video thing to accompany my gender poem. happy trans day of visibility for those of you in more western timezones, lmao. it’s 3AM here. anyway – you know what youtubers say – like, comment & subscribe! tbh tho you don’t have to do any of that stuff, just watch this and tell me what you think, maybe tell your friends if you liked it ❤

1. i’m vanilla in love 2. dark hours (you put me through) 3. high praise 4. two cities pulled violently by the neck 5. sadderdaze BONUS

i know i took ages to do this @tempestintext but i hope this is worth the wait. love you xxx

more than one way to be a gravedigger – divya

i wrote this poem & i am so incredibly grateful that this found a home in South Broadway Ghost Society. very excited to share it with the world ❤

South Broadway Ghost Society

i bet your hands taste like honey. put a finger in my mouth
….& let me dream it. i watch you roll cigarettes –
i know you memorized my number when we were in eighth grade
i know you think of me when you can’t sleep at night

the ghost of me lingers these corridors in your house,
counts your pennies, fucks with your linen. oh baby,
you listen to songs to kill time, you dance in empty houses
and i think of the last boy i loved
& how he set fire to everything

me too, i think. i’ll have that fag, thanks. i am a fag, thanks.
i blow smoke out like a fairy godmother. who am i
if not this broken glass bundle of queer? i have always been
pretty face, ugly existence. the fire alarm, the dynamo.
the girl of your dreams, the girl with…

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apology.

sorry, i said. but it isn’t really worth much
to a boy like you, to a boy like me, to a boy like
us. alright but if i could maybe give you the world anew
we could start it over and i promise
this time you’d smile at me over cordless telephone
and open the door when i come at three AM, i texted you
the simple words ‘i think therefore i AM’ and you, you
told me later you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
i promised you  i wouldn’t cut any deeper but
you already felt last night when your fingers said hello to my ribs
you told me we’d make it, i told you that i loved you
once. you ask me why i break myself over these things,
why i hurt myself, give and take heartbreak and ache like it’s a drug.
i shrugged, wondering how to tell you
that i never deserved you
in a way that you will understand.