a new poem:

the text:

i have lived this life licking
the caps of knuckles, watching
from corners perched,
ready to swoop into hiding

i have lived this life begging myself to
become less a monster, less a creature to cry for.

when i did not change, when nothing about me
grew more agreeable,
i cried for myself – sulking.
mourning this body,
this life.

but here i am
listening to you talk of
crushes and dreams,
classes and parents, and
i am wondering how i could witness
this goodness, and
call us beast;
how i could know you and
know me, and
still subscribe to this doctrine of
our monstrosity.

link to video: http://vimeo.com/33386031

since early march, i have told friends that i have not “bounced back” yet. by “bounced back” i mean that this was not the first time i was in a relationship with someone who told me later on that they did not find my physical embodiment attractive. this is not my first time with someone who tried to make the attraction piece “work” because they appreciated my mind and spirit inside of this body, or the connection we had. in fact, this has been my whole life — a string of experiences where i am the friend people are secretly very emotionally intimate with, but the one who is not invited to parties, the friend the person is conflicted about loving, the date who knows the parents well, but not the person’s other friends. it has been an endless struggle to prove and remember worth in a culture that is relentless in its telling of the wrongness of our bodies. i have enough experience now that if i had known this is where she was, i would not have dated her. it’s fine not to like me or not want to date me, but an uncertainty of my body is non-negotiable.

my sadness is not so much loss for her — we barely knew each other. my heaviness is in being triggered to this place of undesirability. in this rampant culture of ableism, wanting myself is something i have fought for. coming back to this place has been very hard. feeling undesirable and angry at my body/reality was unexpected. i was loving my defiant, resilient body with such an intensity. it hasn’t just been being triggered by her that has been hard. i am starting to realize how hard it is to manage all the things a complex body like mine needs. i am learning to love a body that needs so much from me.

i still feel foolish. foolish for opening myself up like that, foolish for believing disabled girl her would know how to love disabled girl me. foolsih for thinking that intimacy was finding another young, queer, wheelchair using, asian girl with a white daddy, political person.

collecting myself has taken:
poetry
spending time with people with kin bodies, who love themselves
writing out on my iphone at 2 am all the ways i have survived (and wanted to stay alive)
saying no to friendships that i am not emotionally ready for
distance
distractions
love & being held in bed while antony and the johnsons play
talking to a therapist at a queer mental health center
affirmation from my community via snail-mail
coming to grips that this body and all the work it takes to live in it is always going to be my reality
learning how to have respect for my body even when i resent it
energy, so. much. energy.

some days i start to feel like the self i once knew, but so many things bring me back to this place. seeing a disability or queer analysis that has no recognition of what it means to live in a non-normative body is a trigger. seeing people i am in community with having non-wheelchair accessible event is a trigger. on a bad day, having a fight at home, a friend forgetting something important to me, or my sister not calling me back all take me to that place. i know it’s my own stuff. i know how i feel about myself has to come from inside.

and i can’t blame her for not loving me. it has always been my lone work.

i made this video last night to use in a skype poetry reading for a youth conference in ottawa this week. i have a lot of shame around using a ventilator and having a trach.. i’ve been trying to do little things to really face that stuff within myself. (e.g. posting profile pics that have my whole body and not just a tiny piece of my face, telling friends about my access needs around my breathing early in the friendship, writing poems about the reality of my body instead of a fantasy body, etc.) coming to terms with my trach and finding beauty in my breathing feels central to learning to love my body as much as it loves me.

here’s to the beauty in our loud genius bodies.

–
skillshare: i made this using my iphone.. i recorded my voice with voicememo and used the video camera on the phone to record myself and the ventilator. i pasted the clips together, stripped the audio off the video clips, added the audio off the voicememo, turned the contrast up, and added captions with iMovie, a free program on mac computers. (i did all of this in bed, literally at midnight, by typing with one hand.)

leave yr revolver
on the nightstand yr tongue
in the back of
yr warrior mouth

tonight, i pray the rattle of these steady lungs
to be a revolutionary’s lullaby. i pray these misfit
bodies to tell no lies.

i pray your hesitation of my body not to be a dare,
nor your flickering attention
a job well done; i pray your dusty bones
to cry out for me, i pray for me
to let them dead

i pray for desire to do something – anything –
but burn the back of my throat
i pray for movement. i pray for settling.
i pray these loud, genius bodies
to be called home.

body, i pray for the ventilator to hum
us something even sweeter
than silence.

(breath).

i wrote poems about you singing your favorite musicals to me outside in the richmond cold so that when i became angry at you, i would remember your humanity. a constellation of hurts made it too easy a thing to forget. i had poems about the pasta you could order three nights in a row, the debates we’d have walking the sticky streets of the district, the 6 am IM conversations we had in the beginning of our friendship, and all of the 3 am conversations we had over the telephone when you were manic.

it was easy for me to fall into cut-and-dry identity politics — not having it, i truly believed belonging would be found in finding queers, finding people of color fam. you brought out the parts of me that did not feel so radically queer and loving someone who was so white made me question my woman of color authenticity. you reminded me of my dad. instead of acknowledging that i can pass as white, i screamed my commitment to the cause as loud as i could. i drew hard lines – can’t work with white people. or people working within the system. or straight people. or cis gendered men. loving you made shit complicated. every woman of color i knew had a white partner and i didn’t want to be another one.

when grace lee boggs sat with you at dinner and entertained your questions about movement direction, it blew my world apart. i knew she should love me — a young asian girl following in her steps — how could she love you too?

those poems — that kind, gallant boy — was why i kept my hands cupped over our small sticked friendship, rekindling it over and over refusing to let it die. still writing poems, i would have never guessed you to be the one to say goodbye, you to be the one to say “i know i am not someone you can love and actually, that’s okay with me because i know i am worth loving.”

i am sorry i was not a better friend to you, that i let myself forget your humanity. i am sorry it has been years learning this lesson that shared values, love, and a commitment to one another is worth more than any shared experience.

thank you for knowing you are worth all the love in the world.

no one sat me down and said:
“disabled girlchild,
this is what you do
if someone does not want you.”

when you looked at my body and cried,
i did not know what to do but
hold you

i held you
cried over me

if one day a disabled girl child
asks for advice about all
of life’s business,
i will tell her to kick you the hell
out of her bed

hold your head high, beautiful one