How Dare You
How dare you
How dare you stand there
And tell me that my life choices
Aren’t ok with you
That I just need to be quiet
And stop whining
Put down the words
That cut through your smoke and mirrors
To accept the way things are
This is the best it’s gonna get
How dare you
Sit behind that desk
And tell me
“I can help you through this”
“We can deal with this together”
“This doesn’t have to be you”
But this is me
I don’t need to deal with it
Or to be helped through this
I am enjoying the ride
Because I have been afraid
Afraid of the drop
For too long
And I’ve finally let myself reach the top
Ready to fall
How dare you
Tell me to wait
To try harder
Do you know how many hours I have wasted
On my knees
Begging a God who doesn’t care
For an answer different than the one he gave
In his books of “love”
Waiting for an answer that will never come
That book is your truth
I walked away from it
When I was told
That love can be a sin
How dare you
Tell me that loving her is sin
When holding her in my arms
Makes all the pain
Left by the fight
To find a God who will answer
Fade away
Leaving no marks
She makes me feel worth something
To someone
She is the only thing
That has made me feel something positive
In years
She is my everything
How dare you
Tell me that I am evil
For loving in a different way
When I have spent
My entire life
Picking up pieces of myself
From the ground
Where others like you left them broken
From your “love”
And moved on
Leaving me to superglue my soul
Back together
With confidence that I
Am running out of
How dare you
Judge the way I arrange
These 26 letters on a page
Because it’s too dark
It’s too vulnerable
It’s too real
It’s too much
I fight with my mind
Wrestle with my demons
For every single word I put down
And it leaves me
Too exhausted to care
What you think
I don’t need to be quiet
I don’t need to “work through this”
To believe
To fight my feelings
To be “righteous”
To censor myself
All for your comfort
I am enough
I dare you.
Tell me otherwise one more time.
67%
67%
The number of trans teenagers that are sexually harassed at school
But that's ok, right?
They're not people
They're just a statistic
97% are discriminated against at work
A lifetime of fighting to learn themselves
Only for others not to
They are not a statistic
40% have attempted
15% have succeeded
...
No
Jenny attempted
George attempted
Jace succeeded
Jack attempted
Ginny attempted
Jasmine succeeded
Joseph attempted
But who cares about their names
After all
They aren't people
They are just numbers barely surviving in bodies built from the labels others stuck on them
Labels that cut their paper skin like glass and bleed out their hearts until all that's left is unused ink and unshed tears.
1% of people are trans
That may not seem like a lot
But it's 1% of 7, 461, 561, 484
74, 615, 617 people
There's greater chance of being trans than being struck by lightning
Being attacked by a shark
Over and over
I have to explain that they are people
Not a statistic
Not monsters
Just people
Cast out of their homes
Bullied at school
Mocked in the streets
Just for accepting who they are
And I have to wonder
How did we quietly let ourselves turn into monsters?
Overoverover
I used to spin rhymes
At the tinkle of dimes
But lately my words have been failing me
I stutter through sentences with an overly exhausted tongue and distracted mind
Like a crippled butterfly stumbles over the wings it once knew so well
The wings that used fly
Now failing
Over and over
I used to weave tales of princesses falling in love that made the most stoic of hearts swoon
But now mine is a lackluster mind slowly spiraling into a Hell
Where expectations form iron bars
My dreams (mistakes) are the guards
Adorned with armor of self-doubt only pierceable by the finely forged words that I'm failing to find
Over and over
I'm uselessly armed with a noose of tired apologies and overused excuses
A jumble of syllables that have outgrown their uses
There was a time when I could disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed
With prose that painted pictures of people wearing too much purple at parties
And the parasiticidal dogs in the yard that didn't cry as the day of reckoning arrived for those pitiful primates in pallid pigskins
But that day is past
Those sweet times slip through my fingers like salt water from a child's cupped hands as they totter and tip over sliding sand and their soft skin simmers in the scathing sun when they scamper back to the sea for more
But when I turn, my ocean is gone
I have drained it dry and unwittingly turned my island paradise into a harsh, endless desert
And my tongue burns to once again have those sweet succulent words slide over and around and under in an endless cascade of stories and ideas that are smooth to the ear but biting and sharp to the heart
Over and over
I used to taste the tantalizing words that begged to fall from my tongue
But were held back for fear
Fear that to open my mouth against those jabbering judgmental jackals was both an act of defiance and an admission of guilt
Something that would give a reason for them to bury those violently obnoxious words they love so much into my heart to the hilt
Spewing their hate and turning against me
And happen it did
But the light of those burning bridges blinded me
The flames have caused the words that used to drip from my tongue to dry up and retreat so far into my throat
That I choke on them every day that flys past
That I'm forced to rip into my soft palette to grasp even the wispiest of words
As I try to explain that I'm still human too
Over and over
I used to be able to draw tears from the giggler at a funeral with my lamenting verse and vivid lyrics that haunted hearts long after the final word escaped the cage of the singer's lungs and the last note echoed from the body of a well loved violin
But now my lines of lyrics scrape against each other with the endlessly looping sound of a silver fork against a ceramic plate and the satisfaction of monotonously writing the same thing with a dull pencil against paper until the lead is gone and I am stuck with the skritch, skritch, skritching of pencil wood growing louder and louder in my mind, pushing me closer, ever closer to the edge of sanity
to the stitches that are holding me together as I fall apart at the seams
Relentless
Pitiless
Over and over
A long time ago, I could tell my tale and retain my dignity
But now there is no point
I am in pieces on the ground
A doll that had enough and threw itself off its shelf just to change its own painted on face
I am broken at the bottom
A child who didn't understand the danger of the edge and drew too close to that scarlet sky
I am a shadow in the closet
A monster who is too afraid of the dark to open the door more than a crack
A long time ago, I was a whole person
But now I am a crippled butterfly that flew too close to the sun; my wings are a pile of juxtapositions that I've grown tired of trying to piece back together
Over and over and over