Wounded Invisibility

Invisible disability feels like able bodied people looking at you as if your productivity and consistency should compare

Invisible disability is others recognizing your difference and choosing more able people so it doesn’t effect them

Invisible disability is feeling unsafe participating in your own public perception; being unsure whether you are creating your reality or observing it

Invisible disability is being disheartened by your attempts to be accountable for having the life you want to live because when you try to speak or leave your house or make a friend your throat fills with anxieties instead

Invisible disability is trying to connect with your profiles on the internet in a tender call for solidarity but being too gripped by some mysterious force to make time for those who actually show interest

It’s squandering opportunities for friendship because

you can’t commit,

you can’t follow through,

you can’t ask,

you can’t pay attention,
you can't move,

Invisible disability is leaving your body when someone else is touching you
because you don't know how to express what you need or what you want

Invisible disability is not being able to justify that you are not well

You know that others can see the ways in which you do not succeed

because you feel the absence of their respect

You know people judge you, because they treat you different
You see people excel in their careers and feel comfortable in their body and execute their abilities
And, you wonder;
Why not me?
Why is so much of my time spent in recovery?

Why haven’t I recorded a song?

Why haven’t I mowed the lawn?

Why haven’t I found a good job?

And all of those meetings

Why haven’t I gone?

Why haven’t I returned the form that would allow me to see somebody

and maybe be more self sufficient

maybe be more independent

Is there a pill that will make it easier to speak?

Is there a pill that will show me what’s real and what’s anxiety?

And then, help me pretend the truth doesn’t effect me?

Is there a pill that won’t erase the good parts of me?

Is there a life where I look like something good

when others compare themselves to me?

Or does healing look more like repairing
my wounded invisibility

Accepting, I am more capable
when I'm solitary

Letting myself be alone, be invisible

and not feeling lonely

Not trying to qualify

Not feeling bad that I can’t qualify

my disability

Yours

what you give

what you take

what you deserve and

what you can reciprocate

The difference between what you do

and what you say

And

how you thought

you had the right,

to feel anything
any way

When really,

no one wanted to listen

no one granted permission

to give that power away

Power over your validation

Power over our reconciliation

Power over your faith in the human condition

It wasn't something

they wanted to take

It wasn't yours

to give away

Where are they now?

All purities are paradoxes
there is no vacuum packed determinism

You can give and make a difference

You can love without measuring

the cost of losing it

You can create

while everything roots for destruction

even in the scope of our limits

we have power

Languish in your dissonance

It's the oscillations,

the riding wavelengths

That weaves the path

of least resistance

It's the struggle to give back

and do it different

That lets us run the river

Bleeding into basins

Beautiful sketches

Blooming like nerve beds

Swirling like hot pits

Coming together like happy accidents

The meeting of our attempts

to co-create

You did that

You made that change

A tiny creature 
in

A tiny space

and

You've got something to say.

58 Degrees

Blank pages stand

as a monument

to the grasshopper's summer

Even as she dies

she persists,

impatient to live

Luck with no effort

Blessed with no direction

A wanderer sufficed

to fall further

down the wandering path

Over peaks and out of ditches

She always finished last

And was she ever lost?

Was she coming up a step above,

with secret stolen moments

of transcendental love?

If I walk sideways

I may move gently enough

A soft movement of my wings

drying in the sun

Snake Medicine

She's leaving early and going to bed

I'm hanging around for whatever's left

I'm white trash in an abusive relationship

I'm destroying what was never good to begin

I'm going with almost anyone who asks

Until I'm afraid of mirrors;

It's just parodies of futures

It's a cartoonish morphing creature

It's someone on the internet

who says I need a better partner

with thick black frames 
and bottles of lager

He plays Square Pusher

and cartoons from the nineteen hundreds

I don't think he even likes me but,

He turns the lights off

and he ties me

He turns the lights off

and he washed me

He turns the lights off

and he asked me,

When will I see you again?

But half the fun

was the destruction

The guts of a girl who'd rather be dead

Afraid of,

bad allies and false revolution

Excluded

for being smart and assertive.

Burning

for taking it personal

Pining 

to be and not to be

a victim

I didn't make out on parked buses

in bass bumped warehouses.

I didn't drink under bridges

and perform seances

I didn't share a bath

with a girl who painted cosmos

I didn't take a bike ride

or travel to the mountains

I didn't take my shirt off

and run as I fast as I could

for exactly 30 seconds

The part of me that wanted 

to die

was already dead.
Thrown out
and burned up in the crash
When you go back to the spot
you can hear me laugh

I aborted the kid

I forgot the missing limb

I walked inside a fire

where my shadow died

so I could live

I moved to Minneapolis

I lived out of my back pack

I made it as an artist

I hitchhiked with a trucker

I danced til sun up at a rager
I saw turkeys in the mornin
I spent 5 days with a skater
in a hammock in the forest

I took the empire builder 

home for Christmas
talked train routes with the conductor

and I spent three days in my bed
just trying to remember what she said;

I could do anything I wanted

There's nothing to fear

When you're already dead

The Difference Between Falling and Leaning

I listened to Dessa in ways

I had never heard her before

I looked up at my cat from below

as if I was small

His fur rose and quivered
like wildfire

and indeed I was small

Sosh couldn't hear
my missing words

and pleas for interruptions

outside myself

so I took a bath

while she fell asleep

and I prepared
to fall into a void

pass through the abyss

and land firmly

in my subconscious

visions, weaving
symbolic language

without ego

without effort

But I was still distinctly

in my corporeal body

I just stopped creating

I left nothing in front of me.

It was less than death

It was more than darkness

I ceased to exist

I intended to find buried secrets

and lean toward my impermanence

but the surrender was only submission

the darkness was only nothingness

Leaning is more like breathing

you stop attaching

you keep existing

you leave the mind

and the body keeps experiencing

I stopped to feel my chest

and watch the fireworks for a minute

then, I heard a girl scream in the distance

as if out in the airfield

something had happened

But I realized

it was just me

a fantasy of a little girl

victimized and lonely

No one had ever come to

save me

I had walked alone

to hug the sand

and feel the breathe

and tell her I'd take care of it

then I let her go

and I kept moving

Robin's Eggs

The ground went from brown

to speckled white

as a spotted curtain waved

in front of a small winter moon

Like when it rose in San Francisco

It didn't rain there much

but it poured on North Beach

Smokin' shorties

on the Filbert steps

in the Red Light District

the night I came in

and by the afternoon

a rainbow hung over
a turbid, thunder
moon

I figure I'm obligated

to look forward to it

That fresh smell

in the mornings

When the cold covers up

our potentials to bloom

I don't think we'd make it through

our hot wild birthdays,

without this

So, I wish for blanket cocoons

Because all things come

in cycles,

like they're meant to

We call it sanctuary

and we call it prison
We call it a necessary burden

We'd never come

running from our houses

Swimming through
our great adventures

without it

This stillness
This absence

The stillness
The absence