Daddy Issues

The worst part about not believing in god is that there is no one to barter with  

when my dads’ cancer drugs

make him too weak

to lift his arms

he says to my mother,

‘don’t worry’

manages a smile

attempting to be

as luminous as his love

‘everyone dies of something,’

he says with a smirk 

he’s the dreamscape who called kids who were not yet his

to ask for their moms hand

in marriage

calls me by my chosen name

spent what felt like every childhood Saturday painting my nails and making pancakes in the shape of my initials. 

had two-thirds of his kids come out as queer and never once questioned us.

Why

would a sentient god disappear

a man like that? 

it took me half a life to know of toxic masculinity’s existence

because i was raised

by its antithesis.

who now sits five years into cancer 

as the final boss

he isn’t going to beat 

sometimes cancer can’t unhappen

sometimes people do

in my dads unhappening 

the number of nodules in his organs match the number of  

years I have been alive.

I want more years

but I want them with him. 

however, the oncologist noted,

“if nothing changes 6-12 months.”

My dad doesn’t believe that

and, for once, I don’t argue back. 

Keyma said “hope is what we gift ourselves when suffering takes it all away,”

and who am I

to take the ribbon off

of a gift that is not mine? 

I once envisioned him walking me

down the aisle-

gifting me, right?

but now my visions are of myself

fatherless

in a years time.

I microdose grief

so as not to be completely asphyxed by it.

I get choked up

every time I leave my parents home

I think maybe I should’ve stayed a few hours longer.

carried the conversation even when it felt heavy

There was, at times, lots of silence

and won’t there be plenty

plenty of time for that?

Here’s the thing.

I don’t have daddy issues

I have who the fuck am I going to be without my dad, issues.

When I catch my reflection

I am haunted

by the likeness in our faces.

What happens

when that semblance

is the closest I can get to him?

Does anybody know

the word

for missing someone

before they are even gone?

me and alllllllllll of my sad walk into the poetry event

convinced nobody wants either of us to be there.

we’ve heard we’re articulate in front of an audience but now

we get stage fright

just walking up to a circle of people that love us

because how could they

love both of us?

love me and all of my ugly?

in a conversation, we’re figuring out how to be in a conversation

and in the one I’m having with myself,
I’m fighting with my sad who found anger on the way out the door when I made them leave the bedroom and all their other sads.

My sad has sads

a collection of them

posters all tacked up to the drywall

(so many you can’t see the blank space between them).

like an obsessive teenager,

my sad gazes at the wall

of sads as if they were members

of their favorite

boy band.

my sad likes that

the other sads look like him

(a little too much, if you ask me)

It’s not that my sad wants to be them when he grows up,

he just can’t see past his mouth,

past his trying hands.

when you’re stuck, now

is a lifetime.

In this lifetime,

my sad takes up so much space

takes the aux cord when I’m driving

the covers when I’m sleeping

and the limelight in an argument

the whole room

when I’m not careful.

so I’m standing there, at this event,

either a bit too careful or not careful enough

with loved ones I’m trying to remind my brain are loved ones.

i’m never alone

cause it’s me and a mosaic of my big emotions that become increasingly bigger every

time it’s my turn to speak

because I don’t know who’s on deck

or who is up on the mic.

I don’t know which emotion will come out of my lips.

so I grow anxious on my anxious

it sprouts from nothing into an ivy

that dims my facial expressions and

causes me to forget most of the words I know

I keep landing on “cool”

and “interesting”

the anxious fights back

bigger than me most days

It’s not hard-

I’m tiny

just bones and worry

my sad and my anxious enter a toxic relationship which spreads upwards onto my vocal cords

now here I am

language-less

and stumbling on my existence

as a keeper of my sad’s sads

of my anxious’s anxiousness

of my anger who, remember, hitched a ride here, too.

I don’t think a single one of them feel

understood

(most especially by me).

it’s hard to listen

to someone

who won’t stop repeating themself but if someone won’t stop repeating themself maybe

it means you weren’t

listening to begin with.

maybe my emotions have wisdom

I don’t hear because I’m too busy chastising them for being.

maybe one day I will line my own walls with posters of each them

look up in admiration

at my collaborators not my combatants,

      like angels

  with my own trying hands.

chronic fatigue swansong 1/365

Exhaustion is the

a) clingiest partner I have ever had.

b) coat I am always wearing.

c) dance I never stop doing.

d) abusive relationship I can’t leave.

Fatigue isn’t being tired. Unless, by being tired you mean it is your identity. It is my secret one. 

Everything you see of my ease is

a) a costume.

b) fiction.

c) just stage makeup.

I actually would rather be in bed right now.

*writing a poem a day for 365 days.

I want to write a poem that makes my other poems shy.

Make them whisper to each other, ‘just who is that new girl?’

Turn their knowing eyes into awescapes

like children eating their first bit of ____(your favorite childhood nostalgia treat goes here)____.

I want to talk to our inner children

the way we should’ve always been spoken to.

our feelings given acres to run and scream and play tag,

losing our breath in the language of laughing together.

I want to write the kind of poem that makes my other poems starstruck.

I used to want that for the scoreboards,

for my ego,

for _____(your own truth goes here)____.

so I could slip into sleep at night like, ‘they like me. they rly like meeeeee!!’

and I am a shit ton of things but I am not liar

so I will tell you a window into the bedroom of myself.

I’ll tell you that, on some nights, I still do this. It’s comforting

but comfort is a safehouse

and many nights I use it as my own personal grief escape plan.

Spoiler: It fails every time.

My god, isn’t that beautiful?

    that my grief is a song refusing to be unheard.

Just like me.

Just like you.

I want to write this kind of poem for my future self

and my present one.

for the becoming and the became. 

I want that because tomorrow me will always write

the truest poem they can

and I love that for

all of us.

how to survive the unsurvivable or what I do while waiting for the world to regain its color

scroll
through the photos
app on my phone
28,000 pictures and counting-
delete duplicates
the way I want to disappear myself
(but I’m not a copy)
stare
at an image that appears inarguably beautiful
or one in which I do
relish in how
my eyes see splendor
even through all the bullshit
even though somedays

they can’t

on those days

death feels

like a long awaited pause button
a door prize
I wish I could win
there are also days
that I have already won
listen
to the playlist without a single song
that sounds like sorrow.
eat

my weight in worry
or whatever

scouring for the dopamine my brain seems to have misplaced
look
at the unfinished poems
each of them a river of possible
aren’t I also
mostly water?
cry
mix the paint of my misery
into my hopelessness

laugh
at the way the colors run
like I used to from my problems
but I stand now.
root my feet
even under my grief
my world imploded
countless times
and I’m alive
to write the poems about it.

a court of gate-keeping men sit on their thrones

saying they don’t like my poems,

that they never really fucked with me anyway.

took months for the air of this

to reach me.

talking shit is like a cold front-

cold air is heavier than the warm

displaces it

disappears every hug and piece of praise

I shared with those poets

in a five year time span

and subsequently I buried my voice

out in my own backyard

after I had just unearthed it.

Wouldn’t want to bother them.

instead I robbed myself

of the ability to build worlds

because I didn’t revolve around theirs

because someone finally said

what the depths of my doubt

have always known:

that my poems are pointless

that my

wild loud soft and sharp

needn’t be collected and spoken.

I used this as a long awaited excuse

to stop

dissecting my trauma

to turn that interest

exclusively academic

sometimes I still move like

in a peer reviewed journal:

Study Examine Analyze

Delineate

Dissociate

Dissolve.

In a way

it is a lot easier

to let the trauma erode

what’s possible

convince me

that how I think is not something

that needs recorded.

This is what the autism, the adhd, and the anxiety tell me anyways.

If I don’t let the poem

string itself sensical

then I don’t have to introduce myself

to myself on a loop

If I don’t make that mental leap at therapy

I don’t have to feel my way through it.

If I don’t write the anthology,

I don’t have to cower in the shadow

of a maybe brilliant thing

I have just built and live up to it

or in the shadow of a book

no one reads

Instead, I can just be shadow

pretend it is mysterious allure

not cowardice that paints me

quiet

not disappointment

or betrayal.

If I never let anyone too close

they can’t tell the difference.

It takes so much energy

to be alive

to shut the poems down.

I thought I was doing myself

and everyone else a favor

by finally shutting up.

stayed out of the scene for years

but they don’t stay

gone-

the critics

or even the poems

so why silence myself?

for the illusion of safety?

for men?

I know I have to speak

for myself

but the longer I live,

the harder this narrative is

to do out loud.

I think myself so far into myself

that I think

in spiral

into a shell

into a relic

into the question,

am I a scholar of my own trauma

or an architect of my own fixation around it?

Then, I grab a shovel

and get back to work.

Instructions Home, after Jasmine Mans.

Break every shame clogged mirror before you begin

(that way you have already begun).

Turn left at the stoplight across from the small brick elementary school that proved to be reprieve from the kitchen table.

Make a fire of the things you used to believe of yourself.

300 ft from where you ate pistachio ice cream sundaes with at least four toppings and not enough friends, turn right not left.

Leave the seeds of self-harm unwatered

avoid being the teenager

who wrings their forearms

until they’re stop signs

stifling sobs

in their bedroom again.

Run miles in the direction of tenderness

you don’t yet think

you deserve.

you’ll know you’ve gone too far if you never lived the decades that suffocated your own voice.

You’ll know you have arrived

when you start to see yourself

when you hear your name

and it sounds like
all the flowers you’ve been giving everyone else.

The future is crowdsourced.

we pick each other

‘s brains like wildflowers.

capitalism has never been tender with us

so we are relentlessly soft

with one another.

This system leaves us for dead

but we keep bringing each other

nourishment gift-wrapped

as laughter.

we keep bringing each other

Alive.

Just because you don’t want to hear it doesn’t make it fake news.

I speak a poem about my childhood trauma and you don’t like the culpability

you say you have different opinions of my past

I say I think you mispronounced,

“this isn’t how I imagined my legacy”

mispronounced,

“I made you in my image

who are you to be a visionary

not just (my) vision?”

Mom,

I am not a free subscription.

Please

do not try me.

you didn’t like me quiet

but if I’m going to be loud

it can’t be about all the ways I was kept quiet?

you always said, “stop crying

or I’ll give you something to cry about,”

and you did

but even better

gave me something to write about.

if you wanted the story to be told differently you should have treated me differently.

the quote goes, “the ax forgets

but the tree remembers.”

and I felt that

me:

the tallest metal object in a field

you:

lightning

with amnesia.

You raised a carving.

I became living art.

You raised mockingbird.

I became Phoenix.

Watch me

rise.