name: subject:

Dear Mrs Moon,

you left your raincoat on my coat hanger
(the one that's a piece of plastic nailed to the doorway)
and i'd thought i'd tell you that it's still there
collecting dust and after-images
and that the fragrance of your perfume has
long worn off but if i close my eyes tight enough
i can still see the lights that echo around like stardust

i hope you enjoy your new umbrella.

Freakishly forbidden

When they told my I shouldn't love her
I wanted to scream
Loud enough to shatter the glass veranda doors

That they hadn't spent sleepless nights
Tangled in her bedsheets
Breathing in her dreams
As she lay fast asleep

Nor had they kissed her cracked lips
Knowing full well there was lip balm in her pockets
Smiling all the while
Just happy to be in her arms

And they could not imagine
The way the sunlight got lost in her eyes
Or how her hands got lost in mine
Or how she stroked my angry thoughts away
Just by running her fingers through my hair

And so they could not possibly understand
That it regardless of should or should not
I simply could not
Cannot
Will not
Stop loving her.

co-ed

He was sitting on the toilet seat with his legs spread out in front of him, scratching absently at his bare chest. The water-proof shower radio was humming outdated Christmas music between static breaks, and his eyes kept drifting back to Anna's softly bouncing breasts as she furiously brushed her teeth.

No bra, he thought, silently proud he agreed to this co-ed slumber party of theirs while his parents were out of town.

"So, Anna..." He watched as Anna leaned closer to the mirror, squinting and widening her eyes to herself, "When you suck, do you spit or swallow?"

Anna's face dropped in a second and her toothbrush went clattering to the ground. A rising yell started up her throat but got caught on globs of foamy toothpaste and spittles of it went flying at the mirror before she went curling over the sink twisting faucets roughly to spray water into her mouth, switching between trying to curse at him and cough.

A deep laugh erupted, and he fell forward to rest one elbow on his knee as he stretched to pick up her stray toothbrush. "I guess that answers my question,". A spray of water flicked from her fingertips answered him.

An Open Apology

I’m gay, but I’m also critical, curious, and scientifically oriented. Being gay isn’t the most important aspect of who I am. Yet, it is the aspect that elicits the most attention from those around me. I wouldn’t want my parents to pay any kind of special attention to me simply because of my orientation--even if that attention was “positive”. Being gay doesn’t make me any more or less of a decent human being; it is simply a preference. It doesn’t say anything about my intelligence, compassion, or values. All it says is that I have romantic interest in the same sex.

To drive the point home, I know many other gay people, and not one of them is the same. There are millions and millions of people in the LGB community, and the only thing that ties us all together is that we are not heterosexual. Each and every one of us has different needs and preferences, different personalities, different everything. It frustrates me to no end that many people will change their opinions about me (or any other person) simply for being gay. And that’s not just aimed to homophobes, but also to people who idealize being gay, who somehow think I’m cooler or more down to earth simply because of my sexual orientation. That’s even more frustrating sometimes, having my romantic preferences seen as some kind of trendy political statement.

What's perhaps more frustrating than anyone else's reactions to this issue, however, is the fact that I'm guilty of these same crimes. "I love gay people", "Gay best friend", and "Oh, yeah, the gay one" are all phrases that I've used in the past year. I've only now come to realize that these types of phrases only add to the small-minded attitudes and stereotypes that harm gay people every day. And for this I can only offer my deepest apologies and my reformation of self. 

I can't do much to change the past, but for now here's a list of gay stereotype breakers:

Not all gay people are the same.

Not all gay people are cool.

Gay people can be racists, sexists and, yes, even homophobes.

Gay males aren't all fabulous.

Gay males don't all have high-pitched voices.

Gay males aren't all sensitive and mild.

Gay females aren't all butch/alternative.

Gay females are not all good kissers/good in bed.

Not all gay people are flamboyant/in your face.

Not all gay people are promiscuous.

Not all gay people will have long-term relationships.

Not all gay people are atheists.

Not all gay people are open-minded. 

And there are so many, so many, oh so so many more. 

My goal right now is just to break the image of all LGBT people being the same/standing for the same thing. 

Even though sexual orientation is important, it says so little about people as actual human beings.

eleven years

every year, we americans take this day to pay respects to the lost lives of innocent people. we honor the service of our policemen, firemen, and soldiers while recognizing the tragedy of the september 11th attacks.

tragedy is a funny thing. it brings people together. funerals bring families together; this event brought our nation together.

my physics teacher told our class about the 9/11 memorial at the pentagon. there's a little bench for each person who died, with those lost in the airplane facing inwards and those killed inside the pentagon facing outwards. and the worst part is that they're arranged by age. you can see all these different people, ages three to eighty-seven, tied indiscriminately together by nothing but this tragedy.

i partake in the annual recognitions, the ceremonies, the moments of silence for everything america lost on this day eleven years ago. but it's taken me a long time to understand its significance more than nominally.

i was six on the day of the attacks, old enough to remember what happened but too young to comprehend the gravity of the situation. i'll never be able to understand it as today's adults do. as a sheltered child of the suburbs, it took me years before death became to me not merely a fact, but a feeling; years before the humanity and the grief of lost innocence sunk in--and by that i mean not only the death of innocent people, but also the end of a naively trusting era that shattered along with the windows of the world trade center. we kids of the Y-generation have grown up in cynicism. racial profiling and the TSA are not particularly ominous new installments into our society, but rather facts of life that are unfortunately uttered in the same breath more often than not. airport privacy is harder to come by than the internet variety. war and shootings and bashar assad are nothing but headlines, numbing us from the humanity of death. how many more colorado movie killings and wisconsin sikh attacks can we grieve and process?

but if personal emotional reconciliation took years, understanding how 9/11 attacked our nation's identity took longer still. to six-year-old me, the world trade center and the pentagon were vague abstractions. nationalistic abstractions, certainly, but still abstractions. arguably, those two structures are little more than abstractions for many adults, too, but that's aside from the point. i'm not sure how many years of american history classes and civics activities it took for me to even begin to grasp our country's role in globalization, our nation's pride in our greatness, and how the world trade center represented american faith, faith that was destroyed.

i don't know how long it will take to rebuild that faith. i can't say that we'll ever succeed in doing so. but today is the day when we remember to try, to bring ourselves together with the memory of tragedy and to find hope from surviving difficulty. because that's what we need now in order to give ourselves the strength to do the right thing.

hope.

manifesto against the SAT and herman hesse

a red blinking sign flashing white letters affronts me every time i try to explicate my feelings about this. a personal scarlet letter A. word access denied. subject forbidden.

life is so much simpler when there is a right and wrong answer, but in reality all of the choices have some merits and some weaknesses and it's not a matter of correct answer, but best fitting answer.

if pure existentialism was real, then pursuit of success would be so much simpler. perhaps not better, but simpler. no one knows what a single person is capable of achieving. it would merely be a matter of trying and trying, and if success follows, so will amazement. but this world is not existentialist. there are structured expectations that appear in the form of rules and laws and institutions. they try to make right and wrong, light and dark. dichotomies that cannot remain separated, but mingle together, weaving constantly into the fabric of humanity.

maybe this is the result of standardized thinking. i'm stuck assuming one answer is right and the rest are wrong, not by reason but by default. but i know better. there are no right answers. yet i'm still living out this multiple choice test, and i still have to select one choice even if it's a trick question, a badly written one that i can't win. 

no, i'm more worried that i can't differentiate between my moral instincts and the false expectations i've created for myself. while battling to reconcile my inner stirrings with what i believe to be right, i looked for myself and found only this warzone of shielded desires and arrow-sharp reasons working up a fog of confusion in the landscape of my consciousness. they say all is fair in love and war, but this isn't fair. it certainly isn't pretty. 

perhaps i will find myself in faith. but my convictions remain unknown until consummated by action, for there is no to be or not to be; there is only to do or not to do, so i must do, and carry myself to the altar of my beliefs, where thought and feeling can finally marry and i can say

i do, my friend. i do.

Post Traumatic Munchies

Walking walking walking

Down

Down

Down

Strangely familiar ally ways

The sound of new friends with old friends with laughter with memories

Smoke

Smoke smoke smoke

Chimnies, all of us, strangers to friends in an instant

tied together by the bonds of wax paper and all that

smoke.

Time moves

Slow, but fast

A rollercoaster of events seeming to zoom by

but sure enough you roll back into the station

(the one you waited two hours in line to get to)

check your watch and it's only been two minutes

But in your head it's eternity.

Teeth, tongue, caress, caress

Turn away, turn away, turn away

It's not fair

When all this time I've been waiting for someone else.

Walk away, away

Familiar roads, familiar brick, familiar entrance, elevator, back door

Don't look your mother with those eyes

Bee line towards food

Pass out

Wash, rinse, and repeat tomorrow.